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The New and the Old in Oldboy 221to remain secluded. The meeting with the young woman at the restaurantand their instant attraction were guided by the powers of hypnosis and thesinister planning by Lee Woo-Jin.With these shocking disclosures, the film’s narrative not only takes anunexpected turn but invites us to reevaluate the characters’ actions in thisnew light. Oldboy acquires thus a Möbius strip structure that assigns itsprotagonists doubly coded roles with shifting qualities and dimensions. 4Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim, which is the revenge, which isthe punishment, who is in charge of the story, and who is finally vindicatedare all questions that become ambiguous, as the positions of the heroand the antihero turn out to be doubly occupied by the two male protagonists.The classical character-centered causality that appeared in the firstinstance to be the foundation of this narrative becomes daringly challenged,as other powerful compositional elements enter the story, namely thetheme of the double incest and the existential crisis that the two charactersfind themselves in. These two elements become catalysts in the film,complicating the narrative structure beyond any classical norms and,above all, preventing it from reaching a stable and clear closure.Narrative Space and Time: Where, WhenThe complexity and density of the plot in Oldboy parallel the intricate treatmentof the cinematic space and time in the overall narration. The threemain narrational axes – causality, space, and time – in any given film arealways interdependent but there are ways to handle them differently andadopt diverse principles for each one of them. For instance, films like SlidingDoors (1998), Amores Perros (2000), The Hours (2002), 21grams (2003), orThe Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) feature two, three, or moreseparate plotlines that complicate the shape of the narrative logic of thefilm but the spatiotemporal dimensions of each thread remain particularlyclassical. On the contrary, Park Chan-wook’s choices in the handling of thespace and time on the screen mirror the twisted nature of the story andenrich the classical options with a long list of new stylistic devices.Starting with the cinematic space in Oldboy, one is easily impressed bythe filmic universe the characters inhabit. Contrary to the classical prerogativesthat dictate the construction of an unobtrusive visual space to accommodatethe story (Bordwell et al. 1985), the South Korean filmmaker has takenfull advantage of the graphic qualities of the filmic image to manipulate