Oldboy

A Korean businessman is abducted and held for fifteen years in a locked room, then released without warning and set the task of finding out who imprisoned him and for what reason. His search for revenge leads him toward a hidden past and a truth engineered to destroy him.

The film stages the return of repressed memory and the workings of the death drive, showing how a buried act of childhood cruelty and its consequence come back to consume everyone they touch. It offers a therapist a dark meditation on revenge, shame and the memory that will not stay buried. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 and is based on the manga Oldboy by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi.