South Korea is the place to go for the true connoisseur of cinema seeking new and exciting films. Some of the best pictures of the past decade have come from South Korea, such as the war epic Tae Guk Gi, the off-beat rom-com My Sassy Girl, and the horror comedy The Host. There's one genre the South Korean filmmakers have lately been able to pull off better than anybody and that is the hard-assed, ultraviolent revenge movie. One need not look any further for prime examples than movies like The Chaser or Park Chan-wook's brilliant Vengeance Trilogy comprised of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. I Saw the Devil isn't quite as successful as its predecessors, but it does provide a gut-wrenching experience on a purely visceral level.
I Saw the Devil is an all-star collaboration with Kim Ji-woon in the director's seat. Kim first received international press during the Asian horror boom with A Tale of Two Sisters (which was remade by Dreamworks as The Uninvited), then followed it up with the gangster flick A Bittersweet Life and the wild Western homage The Good, the Bad, the Weird. His newest picture features Oldboy star Choi Min-sik and screen idol, Lee Byung-hun, who is probably more familiar to Western audiences as Storm Shadow in G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra.
Choi is Kyung-chul, a merciless serial killer targeting young women. He bludgeons them then takes his victims to his hideout where he decapitates and dismembers them with a makeshift guillotine. Kyung-chul's latest victim is Joo-yun (Oh San-ha), the daughter of a local police chief and the fiancée to Lee's Soo-hyun, an agent for the National Intelligence Service (South Korea's CIA). Both men are horrified when Joo-yun's body parts are found scattered across a riverbank. Thanks to the father, Soo-hyun gathers a list of suspects and quickly zeroes in on Kyung-chul just as he is about to claim murder an abducted schoolgirl. This leads into the hook of I Saw the Devil.
Soo-hyun beats Kyung-chul into unconsciousness, but does not kill him. That would be too easy. Instead, he plants a tracking device inside Kyung-chul and releases him into the wild. Soo-hyun's plan for revenge is to punish Kyung-chul, let him go, follow, then punish him again before he can quench his murderous lusts. Rinse, lather, repeat. Predictably, Soo-hyun's hare-brained scheme of extreme cockblocking goes terribly wrong, placing his surviving loved ones in grave danger.
I Saw the Devil just barely misses the mark in qualifying for torture porn. Those of you with a weak stomach may be thankful that the grisliest stuff occurs off-screen or hidden in the shadows. Somehow this makes the attacks even creepier, including one (seen in silhouettes) in which Kyung-chul repeatedly smashes a wrench into a woman's skull. The squeamish should still be ready to cover their eyes at any moment, especially during a close-up where Soo-hyun uses a scalpel to sever his nemesis's Achilles tendon. It should be noted that the film went through extensive editing to remove violent content in order to receive a theatrical release in South Korea.
The story isn't an easy one to engage with and not just because the queasy violence. The film forces the audience to identify with two rather loathsome characters. If you're looking for someone to root for, forget about it. However, I Saw the Devil never asks you to, it simply drags you along for this twisted cat and mouse game. Any sympathy for Soo-hyun quickly turns to revulsion when you discover rescuing Kyung-chul's intended victims is completely incidental to the primary objective of tormenting the killer. When Kyung-chul traps a nurse, he forces her to strip and perform fellatio on him. Only then does Soo-hyun make his move. He could have easily prevented this happening at all. It isn't so much about saving lives as prevent Kyung-chul from taking them.
Therein lays the film's greatest weakness, an unshakable and unsettling misogynistic bent. Female characters exist solely to be slain or saved. They are terrified, frail, and naïve. This isn't a diverse collection of women either; they are all young and beautiful.
At nearly two and a half hours long, I Saw the Devil is about thirty to forty minutes too long. There's also a bizarre left turn into Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory in the middle of the picture when Kyung-chul meets two friends who not only happen to be serial killers too, but cannibals as well. The script by Park Hoon-jung attempts to convey the futility of revenge and the ways in which it eats away at the soul. Soo-hyun has stared into the abyss, the abyss has stared back, and he relishes it. But, the themes were already richly explored in Park's films. Here, it feels like empty and ponderous moralizing.
Despite the excessive runtime and rough treatment of women, the film has a remarkable visual style thanks to Kim Ji-woon. The dark mood manages to make Seven look like a Saturday morning cartoon show. Kim knows how to construct fantastic action sequences. The movie opens with a chilling scene of Joo-yun being assaulted on a snow covered road, but the centerpiece irrefutably is a scene where Kyung-chul stabbing two men to death as they ride in a taxi. Blood sprays everywhere like an overworked sprinkler system as the camera circles around and around in one take. Kim should definitely be considered one of the country's top directors alongside Park and Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, and Mother).
I Saw the Devil is a nasty piece of work. The visuals are exceptionally stylish. If David Fincher did Hong Kong action, it might look something like I Saw the Devil. The acting is strong with Choi Min-sik portraying the wild-eyed mania that made him famous. His sheer animalism is contradicted by Lee Byung-hun's handsome and stoic visage. The contradictions are also apparent in a plot which alternates between enthralling and repugnant.
Rating: **
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