68 | 3.5 stars | B+
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Cast: Choi Min-sik, Lee Byung-hun, Choi Moo-sung
Synopsis: A secret agent embarks on a game of cat and mouse after his fiancée is brutally murdered.
Genre: Thriller
Key awards: Baeksang Art Awards – Grand Prize
Runtime: 142 minutes
Language: Korean
Singapore rating: R21 (strong violence)
This film is not for the faint-hearted. It is not for those averse to sickening, gruesome torture, or images of naked and mutilated bodies. It is not your ordinary thriller-fare, the kind that caricatures violence, or at worst, fetishises it.
I Saw the Devil is a revenge thriller alright, centred on Kyung-chul, a serial killer. He is vicious, sadistic, and wildly unpredictable. You wouldn’t want to have a conversation with him, knowing him capable of gouging your eyes out any moment he pleases. He tortures, rapes, and murders for pleasure. Victim upon victim – he keeps their shoes, bags, jewellery as mementoes of his twisted, immoral hobby. In the day he drives a school bus.
Choi Min-sik nails the role perfectly. His demeanour, swagger, and violent countenance make you wonder if he really moonlights as a killer – such is his astonishing performance. The man goes around town massacring as easily as lighting a cigarette; he coerces a friend of his – an equally sadistic cannibal (Choi Moo-sung) – into submission; he is void of any morality. In the Korean cut of the film, which I did not see the first time unfortunately, there is a scene where Kyung-chul engages in anal sex with the cannibal’s girlfriend. He cups his hand around her mouth as if simulating rape, thrusting into her animalistically. This is the man whose death we are paying to see.
The man in charge of administering this is Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a secret service agent working for the government. His fiancée is the daughter of a police chief, who encounters Kyung-chul on a snowy night in the middle of nowhere. Her car has broken down, he offers to fix it, she is suspicious; he assaults her and the next moment her severed head is found at the bottom of a river.
The film opens from Kyung-chul’s point of view, his car traversing the outskirts of the city, in search of his next victim. Haunting music, the strumming of guitar strings, foreshadows a thematic grandiosity absent in ordinary slasher films. We fast forward to after his victim has been maimed, her body parts scattered, and Soo-hyun notified of it. He stands at her wake in mute shock. The grief has yet to sink in; perhaps it never will. The police have yet to track down the killer and they don’t seem able to any time soon. Hunting him down seems the only way to avenge her and put his own soul to rest.
A minor spoiler: hunting Kyung-chul isn’t too difficult. Soo-hyun draws up a list of four suspects, and pursues each of them. One is a social recluse who, in the middle of masturbating to porn, gets his balls broken by the avenger. Another gets savagely beaten on the road. Kyung-chul’s parents are easily traced; they, together with his son, are estranged from him. Kyung-chul’s residence is found; upon discovering the lair and its occupants’ belongings, Soo-hyun hones in on Kyung-chul. The hunt has begun.
What we get next is unexpected, at least for someone who goes into the film knowing absolutely nothing about it. (For the spoiler-averse puritan, stop reading here.) It is barely the halfway mark of the film, and Soo-hyun has tracked Kyung-chul to a greenhouse where he is in the midst of raping a schoolgirl. The two confront each other from opposite ends of the greenhouse. The killer is all bluster, relishing the thrill of his exploits. The hunter is silent, seething.
Soo-hyun easily overpowers Kyung-chul in their confrontation but chooses not to kill him. He forces a tracking device into Kyung-chul and leaves him in a ditch with a bag of money. From this point on, their roles have been reversed: the ex-lover of the damsel is now the predator, and the experienced killer the prey. They proceed into a game of cat and mouse, each sadistically inflicting pain and suffering upon the other. The authorities are no longer relevant; this is a personal struggle between a man desperate for vengeance and another desperate for the thrill of denying him his vengeance.
Many critics have lauded the film for its haunting atmosphere, artistically graphic violence, and its ability to interrogate the nature of justice. Who may claim to be just? Is it Soo-hyun, who catches, tortures, and releases his nemesis time after time? Is it Kyung-chul, a social outcast abiding by a perverted worldview of amorality, driven by impulse? Answers are sparse. We are thrown into a high-octane extravaganza of demented cruelty.
I personally disagree that the film is truly morally ambiguous. While it is certain that Soo-hyun becomes increasingly violent and disturbed, could he really be faulted given the circumstances of his fiancée’s end? There is a burning desire, at least on my part, of wanting to watch Kyung-chul burn and suffer. When he does not do so immediately, but is patiently toyed with, the viewer might enjoy the wait equally well.
I Saw the Devil engages and immerses the viewer mainly through its cinematic beauty. Tightly edited, the film conveys both its characters’ deep, disturbed emotions (or the lack thereof) as well as the brutality of violence in general, and complements it with a beautiful soundtrack. There is a scene, right after Soo-hyun releases Kyung-chul for the first time, that is particularly memorable; an exercise of technical genius. Kyung-chul hails a taxi, but the two men in it are actually thieves. He sniffs it immediately and acutely, and proceeds to stab both with a small blade. As the taxi swerves along the road, the camera revolves around it, spinning frantically as blood spurts and gushes, and the savagery of a man just incapacitated is let loose. On one hand a display of craft, on the other a poetic thesis on the chaotic, swirling cacophony of barbaric violence.
This is perhaps the film’s selling point. Lee Mo-gae’s cinematography is highly competent, illuminating both the gruesome streaks of red and the numb, blue landscapes of anger with clarity and sadness. Kim Jee-woon’s serial killer thriller does indeed raise eyebrows – in shock at the gore and gratuitousness of its scenes, and in amazement at its deconstruction of the feel-good rape-revenge genre. It works better at the level of imagery than it philosophises on its themes, but nonetheless I Saw the Devil is a remarkable, satisfying, and fascinating film.
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