A Still-Shocking Masterpiece Worth Catching in Theaters
Twenty years on, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy has lost none of its ability to jar viewers.
This article contains spoilers for the ending of Oldboy.
Many movies with notorious twist endings—such as or —face a steep challenge on rewatch. The impact of the finale evaporates, or is at least blunted, by the viewer’s knowledge of what’s coming. A second viewing is largely an exercise in detecting the bread crumbs leading to the big surprise. When a rerelease of was announced for this summer, I wondered if it would suffer from the same limitations. has one of the nastiest gut-punch cinematic conclusions I’ve ever seen. Twenty
