The Film Society of Lincoln Center kicks off the fifth annual incarnation of its reliably excellent Film Comment Selects series with Old Boy, a revenge melodrama from Korean director Park Chan-wook that won the Grand Prix from the Quentin Tarantino-led jury at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s easy to see what turned Tarantino’s crank, since Old Boy is on some level a glib, violent fantasy that combines an array of genre chestnuts (this one features violent dentistry, incest and extreme sushi) into something resembling an auteurist statement. Despite that prestige, it’s no masterpiece, and its relentless murkiness — not to mention its headlong plunge into operatic tragedy — can be a bit wearing.

The story that eventually unravels is twisted and devious enough that Hitchcock may well have gotten a chuckle out of it, but Park never seems to have a firm grip on his material. Certainly the film benefits from the tremendously grim lead performance he gets from Choi Min-sik (Shiri), who we get to know in the film’s first extended flashback sequence as Oh Dae-su, a pudgy-looking middle-aged drunkard. Oh is then transformed — over the course of a 15-year incarceration at the pleasure of persons unknown — into a dour, shaggy-haired, vengeance-bent wreck of a man. The film’s best scenes come while Oh is imprisoned in that shabby hotel room, watching a television that, he notes in voiceover, serves as both clock and calendar. Park casually deploys a tremendous passage-of-time montage sequence that has Oh on the left side of the screen, undergoing a self-administered training regimen that has him pounding the walls of his cell like the aging Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, as the years fly by on the right hand side, in a frame that shows the outside world as experienced only through the TV screen.

Once he gets out, a drama that figures to be singleminded — compare to the set-up and execution of John Boorman’s terrific Point Blank — gets bogged down in, well, plotting. Oh eventually discovers that there’s something more important than taking down the man responsible for his ordeal — figuring out why it happened. But by that time there’s a million whats and whys already floating around the movie theater. Does Oh escape from his cell, or is he released? What’s up with the hypnotist? And what’s the deal, really, with his girlfriend? (At one point, I was convinced that Oh had never really left his prison and was instead hallucinating everything that happened to him in the wider world.) As Oh follows a trail of scattered clues that lead him into a psychological pas de deux with his dominating tormenter, motivations become clearer and the storyline becomes more distended, reaching ever farther backward in time to explain what the fuck is going on.

If the narrative — and its self-flagellatory culmination — is ultimately unsatisfying, Old Boy still manages to be absorbing viewing from minute to minute. It’s at its best when it indulges a not-inconsiderable sense of humor, as in the long, single-take tracking shot where Oh dispatches a small army of thugs with a hammer, which is why it’s a shame that the overall mood is so bleak. (The Vivaldi is a pretty nice touch.) But if Korean cinema interests you, and if you think you have the stomach for this kind of material, Old Boy qualifies as a stylish must-see.