2 out of 5 stars

A brutal act of violence kicks off Kim Jee-woon’s bloody revenge thriller I Saw the Devil / 악마를 보았다, but it’s far from the only time characters are maimed, assaulted, or killed. Drenched in blood and often featuring people being repeatedly hit over the head with blunt objects, this South Korean film is not for the squeamish or faint-hearted, but ultimately the darkness at the heart of this thriller is more pronounced than its gore. After NIS intelligence agent Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) learns that his fiancée, Jang Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha), has been brutally killed, he will stop at nothing to exact his revenge on the unknown murderer. When he finally tracks down the killer, Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), he decides that a complex form of revenge is in order.

As a core idea, it’s fascinating to consider the point where revenge for a brutal act feels like overkill. Of course, you could just depict an incredibly lengthy and realistic-looking torture scene and have most viewers silently pleading for mercy on the villain’s part—or racing out of cinema screenings—but luckily, I Saw the Devil never stoops to that. Seeing as how merciless torture provides no interesting inquiries into an open-ended question on the theme of revenge, it is replaced by a similarly repetitive—but somewhat more forgiving—formula. As his form of vengeance, Soo-hyun tracks Kyung-chul’s location, beats him viciously, captures him, then allows him to roam free, repeating this process until he has finally broken the serial killer’s spirit.

It’s also a very dull formula, with little dramatic urgency or reason to care about any character who appears on screen. It’s a shame, too, because the first 20 minutes of I Saw the Devil are tense and thrilling, whether it’s watching Joo-yeon first meet the killer up close, beg for mercy upon revealing that she is pregnant, or seeing the search party close in on her remains. There’s an emotive thriller with an interesting moral question lingering somewhere here, but it’s quickly lost. The only semi-interesting remnant of that story which persists is found in exploring when one’s sympathy for Soo-hyun wanes and his revenge tactics feel truly evil, but if you’re anything like me, your interest in this character will have dwindled roughly 90 minutes before this punishing experience ends.

Soo-hyun doesn’t have a personality. There’s a semblance of one in his phone call with Joo-yeon, which is excellent, but from then on he’s too wrapped up in grief and the darkness it inspires within him to feel anything else. He’s like a robot that’s been programmed for revenge and won’t take no for an answer. He carries out his role in this sickening affair without mercy, whether that’s for Kyung-chul or the killer’s many victims. Soo-hyun can track this serial killer’s every movement and hear every word he utters, so he knows when he is about to rape yet another teenage girl or young woman that’s had the bad fortune of winding up in an isolated space with Kyung-chul. But this protagonist couldn’t give a damn about these women, hence why he chooses to walk instead of run towards the killer even when he knows he’s committing rape at that very moment. Soo-hyun could have rushed into the room where it’s taking place just in time to stop it, but the death of his wife has turned him into a monster.

It’s a character trait that doesn’t work on a number of levels. For starters, we know virtually nothing about him other than that he loves his fiancée, which is the sort of shoddy scriptwriting set-up you’d expect in a bad Hollywood movie. Thankfully, screenwriter Park Hoon-jung ensures that the lone interaction between these lovers presents an intriguing blend of tones, with both sweetness and tension to get viewers to feel invested in these characters and Joo-yeon’s impending torment. But that’s it; minutes later, Soo-hyun is a grieving man, and from then on he’s downright villainous, even if he’s become this horrible figure for understandable reasons.

We’re not watching a man lose his humanity in I Saw the Devil. It’s gone near-instantaneously, and we knew little to nothing of Soo-hyun before it happened. So when assessing the theme of revenge in this film, there’s very little humanity to contend with. As for whether or not Soo-hyun takes his scheming too far, that’s also a pointless question. Why does it matter whether he behaves too cruelly to Kyung-chul during the movie’s climax, when roughly halfway through this repetitive experience he shows that he couldn’t care less about the welfare of the women that this serial killer brutalises? A thousand women could suffer the same fate as his fiancée, and Soo-hyun seems as if he would simply shrug his shoulders in apathy, passing the blame onto those perpetrating this harm instead of considering that he has a moral obligation to prevent it. No matter how far this punishingly repetitive revenge scheme goes, callousness towards victims of rape and murder is far more reprehensible than overzealously punishing the man committing these acts. For that reason, there’s no journey to go on, nor does the film poke and prod at the grey areas of morality.

As for Kyung-chul, he’s a robot, too, one designed to hurt whatever woman ends up near him. Once this protagonist drops off our villain in a new location, usually more bloodied, bruised, and broken than he was before their last encounter, he’s committing new atrocities within minutes. One would think that a middle-aged man who’s clearly not new to killing would make some effort to conceal his crimes, but that goes out the window in this absurd fantasy land that these characters get dropped into. The fact that I Saw the Devil chooses to include police officer characters in this film only underscores how utterly ridiculous it is that these assault, rape, and killing sprees continue mostly unimpeded, to such an extent that there’s a strain of dark humour found in this repetitive violence.

It’s a cynical approach with only one redeeming quality: its direction. Kim Jee-woon does a fantastic job of livening up some of these action scenes, particularly in the film’s first half-hour, when the revenge plot hasn’t yet been established and one can feel that there are some stakes to this story. These sequences are propulsive, bursting forward with a chaotic energy that’s as visually diverse in its shot selections and camera movements as it is gritty and thrilling. The opening and closing shots of this film, which linger for about two minutes each, are also a highlight, emphasising tension in the opening and tragedy in the closing, each one a beauty to behold. The music is also particularly strong in these emotive moments.

It’s the rest of the film that’s severely lacking in character development, tests of morality, and emotional investment. The violence became boring after a time, where no matter how proficient this filmmaker is at depicting action scenes, there’s so little to care about given this movie’s uber-repetitive formula and the sense that nothing really matters the first three or four times these characters tussle with one another. There’s a clear emphasis on the brutality of this violence, with blunt objects being struck over people’s heads dozens of times, but even that’s underwhelming given how often characters are brutally bludgeoned yet never permanently impaired, let alone dead from blunt force trauma. I Saw the Devil is unrepentant and unabashed in being a meaningless non-journey of a film, with little to justify its endless brutality.

SOUTH KOREA | 2010 | 144 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | KOREAN

frame rated divider retrospective

Cast & Crew

director: Kim Jee-woon.
writer: Park Hoon-jung.
starring: Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Chun Ho-jin, Oh San-ha, Kim Yoon-seo & Choi Moo-sung.