I SAW THE DEVIL
Directed by Kim Jee-woon
Produced by Kim Hyun Woo 
Written by Park Hoon Jung, adapted by Kim Jee-woon
Released by Magnet Releasing
Korean with English subtitles
South Korea. 141 min. Not Rated
With Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik & Chun Kook-haun
 

I Saw the Devil is a tough, engaging, brutal film—from Korea, you don’t say—that strips away the human condition until there’s just pure animal rage and mania or just nothing at all. Choi Min-sik, who forever made his mark on modern film history in Park Chanwook’s masterpiece Oldboy, makes his return to the screen after a five-year absence. Only this time, instead of playing the victim, he’s the villain. And the sort of nasty and soulless kind that relishes what he does and feels no pain, fear, or remorse.

Min-sik’s serial killer, Kyung-chul, finds stray women at night on the side of the road or elsewhere, takes them back to his dark warehouse-lair, cuts them up, and dumps their bodies. When his latest victim, a pregnant woman, is found scattered about on a riverbank, it stuns the locals but none more so than her fiancé, Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun). Soo-hyun is stunned, but he’s not powerless. On the contrary, he’s a secret-service kind of guy, like Liam Neeson in Taken, with highly trained skills, like, say, killing and fighting if needed. And now that he has no fiancée, he makes Kyung-chul his latest project.

By “project,” I mean this is how the film takes its shape. Normally with a cat-and-mouse thriller you have one side toying with the other. This time it’s a little different. It’s like a catch-and-release game. When Soo-hyun finally tracks down Kyung-chul, which isn’t too hard to do as he seems to pick up a woman every other day to murder, he could kill him very easily right then and there. But he doesn’t. Why? Why not? His aim, and one that draws the audience in a twisted way, is to have Kyung-chul feel fear and pain, just like his victims did. The drawback, however, is that the killer is an Anton Chigurh/Terminator type. Keep screwing around with him and he just gets a little annoyed, not scared or terrified.

Kim Jee-woon’s film builds up tension as Soo-hyun tracks his nasty adversary and then springs it out with intense action, though not like in his previous film The Good, the Bad, the Weird. This time he plays it all for chilling, stark effect with a style that is pure psychological horror. We know the mind games that one man can pull on the other, and seeing how the other reacts is terrifying but so powerful to watch. A key ingredient here is Choi Min-sik’s performance. While Lee Byung-hun has some good scenes of acting, not least of which when he has to talk with his dead girlfriend’s family, it’s really Choi’s show. He turns a heartless, cold, and evil character (as the title would suggest) into a human monstrosity that takes no crap from anyone, including fellow serial killers he sometimes befriends. (Those scenes, just to hint at, are some of the funniest but most violent of this or any year). Like in Oldboy, you can’t look away from this actor, no matter how painful the movie gets. Jack Gattanella
March 4, 2011