Now available on VOD
Cast:
Byung-hun Lee as Kim Soo-hyeon
Min-sik Choi as Kyung-Chul
Gook-hwan Jeon as Squad Chief Jang
Ho-jin Jeon as Section Chief Oh
San-ha Oh as Joo-yeon
Yoon Seo-kim as Se-yeon
Directed by Kim Jee-woon
Review:
When I watched I Saw the Devil, the latest film from critically acclaimed South Korean director Kim Jee-wood, I actually did see the devil.
No, he wasn’t a lady trapped in an elevator with a group of strangers. He was something far more disturbing: a brutal, soulless, narcissistic predator named Kyung-Chul. We are introduced to him on an isolated stretch of road as he attacks and murders a woman stranded in her broken down car.
The woman was the wife of government agent Kim Soo-hyeon, who tears through a succession of suspects until he finds Kyung-Chul poised to rape and kill a young girl in an out-of-the-way greenhouse. An incredible physical fight ensues and Kyung-Chul is beaten into unconsciousness.
If we were dealing with a more conventional, less creative take on the serial killer film, I might have just described an entire movie. This is actually only the first part of I Saw the Devil. Kim Soo-hyeon doesn’t take his wife’s murderer in and he doesn’t kill him. Instead, he implants a high-tech surveillance device inside Kyung-Chul, stuffs a large wad of cash into his pocket and leaves him alone.
Kim Soo-hyeon then enacts his plan for revenge as he systematically brutalizes his wife’s killer, sees that he gets medical attention, then releases him only to track him down and attack him again.
The plan succeeds until Kyung-Chul gets wise to the surveillance device inside him, removes it and unleashes his own twisted vengeance.
While there’s been a lot of focus on the considerable graphic violence in the film (that required some trimming in its native South Korea in order to be released there), it’s interesting to note that the sexual assaults Kyung-Chul commits are portrayed with far more restraint than his initial physical attacks or the many harrowing scenes of head-to-head violence. Yes, it’s an absolutely gut-wrenchingly brutal film and these graphic scenes are both very appropriate for the subject matter and necessary to create the savage world of I Saw the Devil.
The most interesting critical issue here is the underlying philosophy of that fictional world. One of the characters warns Kim Soo-hyeon not to become a monster while he pursues Kyung-Chul, paraphrasing the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote “he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” While this may have been the intended overriding idea of director Jee-woon Kim and screenwriter Hoon-jung Park, it just doesn’t come off in the film. Kim Soo-hyeon transforms not into a monster but rather a ruthless vengeance machine.
I Saw the Devil isn’t Nietzsche, it’s pure Charles Darwin “survival of the fittestâ. It’s hunters taking prey and in turn being hunted. This is nowhere more apparent than in two of the very fresh and creative sequences that help set the film apart from its more routine cinematic cousins.
One of these sequences occurs after the first time Kyung-Chul is subdued and released by Kim Soo-hyeon. Walking down a country road in the middle of the night, Kyung-Chul is picked up by a taxi that turns out, in a twist that would have made Jim Thompson proud, to have been commandeered by two homicidal robbers masquerading as driver and passenger. Ever the cunning predator, Kyung-Chul gets the drop on his would-be attackers and, in a wild scene, engages in a bloody knife fight with them in the moving cab from which he emerges the sole survivor.
The second especially Darwinian scene occurs when Kyung-Chul holes up with a friend from his past in a country hotel. The friend and his female companion are a cannibalistic duo that capture and imprison women until the time comes to butcher and eat them. During a sit down dinner, Kyung-Chul’s friend manages to insult him. With a few words and a steely, murderous gaze Kyung-Chul reduces his flesh-eating cohort to tears, establishing who the true alpha dog in the room full of human-hunters is.
While the final confrontation between Kim Soo-hyeon and Kyung-Chul contains some torture elements and verbal exchanges that seem a bit repetitive, I Saw the Devil definitely raises the bar in the serial killer subgenre, an obviously very well-trodden branch of the psychopath film.
Most serial killer films (and countless TV police shows for that matter), even ones that are considered milestones like Silence of the Lambs, use the same basic “procedural” story: as a killer continues a murder spree or keeps a ticking clock on a particular victim, a detective character or characters piece together clues and follow leads that eventually culminate in a climactic confrontation where the killer is taken into custody or dispatched in one way or another.
David Fincher’s Seven turned the conventions of the subgenre on their ear with a story in which not only does the younger detective not learn anything from the older detective, the killer never would have been caught unless he turned himself in to the police. The film further bucks convention by having even that act revealed to be part of an overriding plan that the detectives find themselves ensnared in and victim of.
I Saw the Devil also separates itself from the crowd, providing freshness with its unique revenge plot and some unforgettable scenes, including some very intense, well-choreographed fight sequences. On top of that, the film is a real rarity in that it’s one of the few films you see in any genre or subgenre that truly has you wondering what’s going to happen next.
This film unites director Kim Jee-woon and actor Lee Byung-hun for the third time. The pair previously worked together on the gangster film A Bittersweet Life and the Spaghetti Western riff The Good, the Bad, the Weird.
While all the performances are solid in I Saw the Devil, special mention must be made of the powerful acting of Choi Min-sik. While he will be forever associated with his award-winning lead role in 2003’s modern classic Old Boy, his Kyung-Chul is a remarkable screen creation. The character may be a monster, but Min-sik Choi makes him an undeniably human monster, showing his arrogance, misogyny and essential need to dominate and ultimately destroy other people. A great performance by a great actor.
