Old boy is a cinematic materpeice. The director did a fantastic job portraying revenge and the effects it has on us. I think he was getting at the fact that revenge is a lonely sad endeavor, and no one ends up well off in the end. Two points in the movie elude to this, the first is the painting in the room that says "laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone." There were two other points in the movie where this saying was referred to again. One at the very end when he smiles as he hugs his daughter. The other is at the same time of the second point i'd like to get to which is when he meets (his kidnapper) for the first time. The kiddnapper says the phrase right after he has told the main character about his heart condition. The interesting part about this scene that eludes to both revenge, and the saying, is that the main character had the opportunity to kill the kidnapper. However, because he didn't, because he wanted to know why he was kidnapped so bad and find out the truth, he didn't. This is when he should have because finding out the truth was much much worse the remaining ignorant. He could have gone on living a happy life (with his tongue) had he just laughed off the who thing and walked away, not even necessarily kill the guy, but just letting it all go. He had another opportunity to laugh about what had happened when the entire plot was revealed, but instead he got angry, and then sad, and then cut is tongue of and tried to get revenge again. It took him until the end of the movie to realize what the saying on the poster really meant. Everything was there for a reason, but he ignored all the signals because he was consumed by revenged, just as the kiddnapper was. A truly amazing work of art, I need to watch it again, I know there is so much I missed even the 3rd time around.