REVIEWED - OLD BOY: At Cannes this year, only Fahrenheit 9/11 blocked the way to the Palme d'Or for this extraordinary psychodrama, the second in the revenge trilogy from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director of Sympathy For Mr Vengeance.

Old Boy is a genre film of the kind that rarely gets rewarded by high-minded festival panels, but, anointed by this year's Cannes jury president, Quentin Tarantino, it received the runner-up award, Le Grand Prix du Jury, and well deserved the accolade.

Opening in 1988, the first half of Old Boy concerns the unexplained abduction of Oh Dae-su, a loud-mouthed drunk and adulterer and his 15-year captivity in solitary confinement. He subsists on a diet of fried shrimp dumplings and watches the turbulent events of the world outside on television. He draws up a list of the many people he has hurt and threatened, wondering which of them may have locked him up in his makeshift cell. And he maintains a fiercely tough physical training regime to keep him in shape for whenever he might escape or be released.

The thoroughly unsettling consequences feature extreme close-ups of live octopus consumption, bloody torture by dentistry, expertly staged, bone-crunching fight scenes - and narrative revelations that are as startling as they are twisted, and more disturbing than the creepiest shocks delivered in the powerful American mindbenders, Blue Velvet and Se7en. You have been warned.

The intensity of Oh Dae-su's brooding, paranoid solitude is matched in the brilliantly staged set-pieces when the movie departs the claustrophobia of this private prison. These adrenalin-charged sequences are masterfully captured in swooping strokes and from the most unexpected of angles in Jung Jung-hoon's fluid, free-wheeling camerawork. The action is accompanied by a lush, sweeping orchestral score that might be more apposite in a romantic melodrama, yet serves highly effectively as a counterpoint to the visceral engagement of Park's film.

A bravura exercise in sheer cinematic style, Old Boy is equally accomplished as a riveting personal study of an initially entirely unsympathetic character etched in a rich, complex and vigorous portrayal by the remarkable Choi Min-sik.