So here’s a sick and disturbing premise. A violent sadist stalks and tortures a powerless victim for an entire movie, leaving collateral damage along the way, until the victim decides to fight back. Typical slasher? The twist is, the victim is an unrepentant serial killer who abducts, bludgeons, rapes and hacks up young women for fun.
That’s I Saw the Devil, a brutally twisted revenge yarn that sounds like an injured party’s wish-fulfillment fantasy: a Korean Intelligence secret agent whose fiancee randomly becomes the latest victim in a psychopath’s killing spree decides to turn the table and hunt down the killer, who is clearly outmatched by the agent’s special training. It’s kinda what happens if Jason Bourne decides to take some time off from espionage to torture Silence of the Lamb’s Buffalo Bill for a few days.
The term “torture porn” gets thrown around for grisly horror films a lot, regardless of whether or not torture is actually at play in the films, because it has become such a catch-all for anything that’s gory and empty. The term doesn’t sit right with I Saw the Devil, even though it actually does engage, at times pornographically so, in a lot of bloody torture scenes. It’s because the violence has a sense of purpose to them. They balance the perception of the two lead characters—how violent can they get without losing the audience completely?—almost as a challenge to our moral compass.
There are plenty of revenge films that try to say that the hero him or herself turns into a monster in their violent quest for vengeance. It’s too obvious a message to not come into play when you do a revenge movie. Choi Min-sik, who plays the inhuman serial killer Kyung-chul in this film, gained international recognition by starring in Oldboy, a revenge movie that certainly put that theory to the test. Typically, though, no matter how violent those anti-heroes get, we don’t think about the moral compromise too much, as the violent quest is either entertaining or cathartic. It’s different here, as the film’s point isn’t to show the petty, cyclical nature of vengeance the same way Park Chan-wook’s beloved trilogy did; but to provoke an increasingly visceral rejection of the tragic hero’s justification of his actions.
Part of it is the methodical nature of the hero’s payback, which extends beyond the sort of emotional vengeance that people can relate to. 40 minutes into this 140 minute film, agent Soo-hyeon—played with an excellently delayed display of his grief throughout the film’s runtime by Lee Byung-hun—already has Kyung-chul beat senseless and apprehended, ending the crime thriller the film was only pretending to be. From then, it crosses a line into something else as the superspy keeps catching and releasing his game, just so he can have more sadistic pleasure to look forward to. Each time, of course, Kyung-chul grows angrier and likelier to hurt innocents.
What prevents it from being too repetitive is director Kim Jee-woon’s inventive camerawork, gorgeous framing and electrifying command of action scenes. Choi Min-sik’s continuous-shot fight scene set inside a taxicab contains as much jolt as his now-classic hallway fight from Oldboy.
It’s not a substantive screenplay at all, but the operatic game of oneupmanship deserves applause for its gutsiness. The morality scale-tipping isn't all its got—otherwise the Blu-ray should come packaged with a stiff drink—there are plenty of pitch black humor (think Man Bites Dog) throughout that keeps the tone dynamic enough to keep watching. The film knows full well that when it gets going, it's treading in absurdist territory, with appearances by a cheery cannibal and coincidental encounters with other psychopaths.
This is movie as deliberate statement, which uses the thin plot and the one-dimensional characters to distill the point into its rawest emotions. In just one of his many takedowns of Kyung-chul, Soo-hyeon strikes the mad dog over and over with a metal rod. It should be stomach-turning because of the amount of blood leaking from Kyung-chul’s head, but it is in a completely different way instead, with Soo-hyeon not being able to stop himself from repeating the word “Why?” That he knows there is no answer to that question is the film’s bleakest angle.
There’s something astonishing about a film that tries to be both unapologetically gory and crushingly sad. I Saw the Devil is too harsh to be cool and too simple to be rewarding to watch again and again, but as a pure unencumbered rumination of the plumb fucking ugliness of what revenge in man’s heart looks like, it’s powerful stuff, and should be appreciated at least once.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
There are only two, both in low-quality standard definition. One is a timecoded reel of unselectable deleted scenes, and the other is a subtitled 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary. Neither are particularly memorable.
"I Saw the Devil" is on sale May 10, 2011 and is not rated. Horror, Thriller. Directed by Kim Jee Woon. Written by Park Hoon-jung. Starring Byung Hun Lee, Min Sik Choi.
