The return of the commercial flip phone is not just remarketing, it signifies a reinforcement of habit and style also demonstrated by the big-screen 4K restoration of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy at New York’s IFC Center, a standard-setting showcase of film trends. The absurdly violent revenge thriller by South Korean filmmaker Park won the Grand Prize at 2004’s Cannes Film Festival — one of the key cinematic events that broke Millennial culture. This revival means more than just 4,000 pixels that deliver a clearer, brighter digital image; Park’s film intensifies the hostility and decadence that now define our malaise. Here’s how we lost our moral compass.

Oldboy’s backward detective story details the escape of average-man Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) after 15 years held captive in a bizarre hotel room/cell, and his subsequent drive for retribution against the unsuspected forces that imprisoned him. Dae-su kept time by tattooing his forearm, practicing martial arts, and watching endless broadcasts of political news/indoctrination, occasionally missing his wife and infant daughter. He doesn’t simply inquire into right vs. wrong; his private battle parallels contemporary media distortion and social collapse. When he is mysteriously handed a flip phone, he finally meets his longtime oppressor and exclaims, “Erasing my memory and telling me to find the truth was unfair.” That loaded statement resounds with the recent dismantling of virtues and the court decisions that disguise revenge as “justice.” We’re all Oldboy now.

Park broke the culture by celebrating the vitriol of personal and social antagonists through a juvenile plot adapted from Japanese manga. Park was not prescient; France’s Claude Chabrol had already found a word for this phenomenon in his 1970 movie La Rupture (The Breakup), in which he contrasted memory and fairy-tale goodness to the drugs, porn, and feminist culture of the post-’60s era. That aberrant development is still with us via Dae-su’s flip phone and warped psychology — the guilt and anger that drive his unholy quest. IFC’s gatekeepers understand this (especially following last year’s critical celebration of Park’s foul Decision to Leave). Hipster culture is looking to bolster its anti-traditional amorality. Rapacious Dae-su is the perfect “hero” for Biden supporters.

Oldboy debuted exactly ten years after the sea change of Pulp Fiction, which reduced pop cinema to sarcastic pulp. Quentin Tarantino was president of the Cannes jury that awarded Oldboy. (Q.T. gave the top prize, the Palme d’Or, to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.) It’s easy to see Q.T.’s adolescent attraction to Park’s relentless carnage. The flamboyant sadism is visually striking, beyond Q.T.’s capabilities. Note Dae-su’s sepia-tinted, high-school-yearbook-based flashback where visual discontinuities mix subjective and imaginary points of view. It evokes M. C. Escher’s famous 1953 multiple-staircase painting Relativity, making it kinetic. This leads to the film’s primal scene: an incident of incest presented through voyeurism.

Objectivity doesn’t exist in post-Tarantino, post-Park cinema — just slapstick nihilism. Perversion and political derangement are set as narrative norms. The title Oldboy refers to a cheer from Dae-su’s Sangnok high-school days that inflamed him (“Seeking revenge has become a part of me”) as well as his lifelong enemy. In turn, Park’s story of Asian class-motivated revenge inspired Spike Lee’s 2013 American-set remake, also titled Oldboy (a misinterpretation as awful as Scorsese’s The Departed, a drab remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s dazzling Hong Kong feature Infernal Affairs).

Oldboy is flashy, but there’s a moral and social disconnect between showing off Park’s undeniable chops and Choi Min-sik’s wild-haired, wild-eyed, poignant descent into madness. (“Thank you for listening to this terrible story to the end,” he tells a therapist/hypnotist.) Dae-su’s turmoil resembles the nightmare of 2023 when the rule of law is flouted and legislative violence and civic decadence are normalized. This hipster movie revival coincides with our constant demoralizing. Park’s statement that his films stress “morality with guilty consciences as the one core subject matter” defines a culture devoted to adolescent rationalizations. Oldboy is a derangement-syndrome classic.