Businessman Oh Dai-su, (Choi Min-sik), is abducted from an empty Seoul street and imprisoned for fifteen years. During this time his unknown captor denies him human contact. Oh Dai-sus only link with the outside world is the TV, through which he learns his wife has been murdered and his daughter has been sent to Sweden for adoption. His jailors eventually release him helpless into the world, where he is consumed by hatred and the need for revenge.

Park Chan-wook directs with a dispassionate eye there is no sympathy for his protagonist. He concocts a fantastical, well-paced thriller that keeps the audience guessing and on the edge of their seats as they react to the plot twists. There is gut-wrenching violence, man against man and man against octopus. But despite the innovatively realised hammer scene and other moments of gore, it is perhaps the psychological rather than physical torture that stays with us (- or maybe it is actually that scene with the octopus).

And underneath the action there’s a philosophical question is a sin still a sin if the perpetrator is unaware. Some of the most innovative film-making in extreme cinema is coming out of South Korea, and Park Chan-wook is one to watch for the future.

We are so accustomed to thrillers that exist only as machines for creating diversion that its a shock to find a movie in which the action, however violent, makes a statement and has a purpose. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times.

This is cinema that holds an edge of cold steel against your throat. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.