I Saw the Devil - Movie Review

I've become a big fan of South Korean media in these past few years. Kingdom, Train to Busan, Parasite, and recently Squid Game have all blown me away with their productions, excellent acting, and wonderful stories/ scripts. These have made me want to explore more international media because I love learning about new cultures and how these cultures do their own versions of stories we've all heard. Just like last year I decided to watch another South Korean horror movie because there are some really damn good ones out there. So to balance out the comedy from Santa Clarita Diet and the mourning of Lake Mungo I needed to review a film that would take the violence to the nth degree. So this week I must talk about South Korean film that might be darkest revenge story I've ever seen: I Saw the Devil.

I Saw The Devil revolves around two people, the first of which is a man named Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), a bus driver and serial killer who murders a woman one winter night. The other man is Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), an agent of the Korean secret service and the husband of this murdered woman. Learning of his wife's death Kim decides he must hunt down her murderer and goes on a bloodthirsty hunt to find her killer. Soon these two men are locked in a game of cat and mouse, with Kim playing Jang so he can suffer as much as possible before he kills him. Soon though Jang begins to understand Kim and the two being a cut-throat battle of brain and brawn against one another and as the story goes on two questions begin to emerge: Who is the cat and who is the mouse? And which one of them is the devil?

I've been wanting to watch this movie for a long time, ever since I learned about it from Chris Stuckmann on youtube. He gave the movie an A+ and that, along with the way he described the film, absolutely caught my attention. I Saw the Devil did just that, along with providing two exceptional performances and a plot with tension that never stopped rising. I Saw the Devil needs to be known more in the horror community because while there is nothing supernatural about the film, it's still horrify with it's incredible graphic violence and hero who might be as frightening to the audience as the villain. I'm going to keep spoilers to the minimum and keep important information to a minimum so anyone else who wants to watch goes in blind. You have been warned.

Let's begin with our main characters. Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik put their heart and souls into their performances because both always kept my eyes on the screen. Both of them had their moments alone and moments together for us to see both their perspectives and it works wonderfully. Choi Min-sik's character is a sick psychopath, kidnapping and raping women before killing them and butchering their bodies for fun (as well as possibly cannibalizing them). Jang is frightening because you always feel afraid for anybody around him. He enjoys what he does and continually traps people weaker than him in situations where he can toy with them before he kills them. It's sick, disgusting, and terrifying. The film also never makes him sympathetic, even as he pleads for his life, which I feel we should have more in films. It's fine to have a villain we can pity, but not if they're psychopaths who relish murdering people.

But oddly our hero Kim is just as scary as his nemesis. Normally in these types of revenge stories we have our hero starting heroic to avenge his loved one(s) and doing a couple of bad things to do that. In this case, Kim Soo-hyun is savage as fuck! Immediately in his investigations he kicks down a the first culprits door, beats him up, ties him to a chair, and when he can't give answers he smashes the guy's testicles with a pipe wrench. Seriously, the guy is in the hospital because his nuts were destroyed and this isn't a funny scene. He's willing to immediately go to extreme lengths to capture this murderer and make his existence nothing but pain. When he goes after Jang he's not a man of the law, he's a hunter. He keeps letting Jang go after every capture, but leaving him permanently damaged so he's weaker and in more pain. His ruthlessness and obsession to make his wife's killer suffer so much can make us question if he's really a good person or not. But this ferocious attitude towards hunting down his wife's killer also feels more realistic and something that the audience could also connect with.

There is nothing cheesy or cheap about the violence and emotion in this film, which doesn't give a fuck about those people with weak wills or queasy stomachs. I've seen some gruesome violence throughout my years, from decapitations to zombies ripping people apart and eating them alive, but I Saw the Devil might take the cake for the most horrific violence I've seen in a movie. The aforementioned scene where Kim continually smashes a pipe wrench on a man's crotch in an interrogation looks so fucking painful! There are broken bones, strangulation through plastic bags,tons and tons of brutal bludgeoning to the head, and so many knife fights and stabbings! People get fucked up in this movie and the movies has great cinematography and effects (physical and digital) to capture it all. There's a scene in a cab that blew my mind in how was shot. Like any other director would try and hide what happens with a fake body or something, but everything is captured in a way I didn't think was possible and it made my eyes bulge out of my head.

Another huge positive of I Saw the Devil is the pacing. This film is just under two hours and thirty minutes and I was never bored with the film and the tension never dropped. It's a slow burn, the tension always kept slowly rising up because the stakes kept getting higher with both main characters as they learned more of each other and tried to fight the other off with whatever they can. Nothing felt rushed or too slow though, I was always comfortable with how much story the film was giving me while not overloading me. The story also had some great twists and turns to it that were really well written and fit perfectly with the narrative. For the first time in a long while I needed something to hold and squeeze so I wouldn't do something like bite my fingers off. A beer can suffered greatly to fulfill this roll.

Now I'm not Korean, nor do I know any Korean. But I English translations of the Korean dialogue to be very well done. It all sounded very realistic while also having some spice to it. Every character in the movie, big and small, had their moments to shine with the dialogue. There were just so many good interactions between all the characters and Choi Min-sik mad everything so uncomfortable with his words and the way he kept intruding on people's personal spaces. Translations can be difficult for some languages and sometimes they're not perfect or don't full reveal what the original language is trying to say. But when I watched I Saw the Devil I got some incredible translations and dialogue.

Lastly, I have to iterate that this movie is one that not everyone is going to be a fan of. The evil this film has throughout it might turn off a lot of people. There is so much gruesome realness and violence that some people might think, "Somebody actually enjoys this stuff?" I get it, there so much thematic darkness in this movie you'll feel like you're watching two devils unleashing themselves upon themselves and the world. The director, Kim Jee-woon, was forced by the Korean media rating system to cut the film multiple times because how violent it was. The film even received a "Restricted" rating twice, preventing any sort of release in theaters or on home video. That's crazy! But this realism and epic violence is what makes it so good because these extreme characters clashing with one another, combined with an excellent script, creates nail-biting levels of tension and excitement that it'll keep those interested glued to their screens. There is so much emotion through the film I couldn't help be sucked in.

I Saw the Devil is a masterpiece of horror. Last year I gave a near perfect score to Train to Busan and this year I Saw the Devil is walking home with that perfect rank. Slow, but perfectly paced, this movie gave me everything I wanted from a horror movie while going the extra mile to fuck with my heart and emotions! The battle between these our hero and villain was so insane and well-shown that remembering their conflict gives me shivers. If you're looking for an incredibly violent horror movie with some intense storytelling and amazing performances, I Saw the Devil is absolutely worth it!

Tentative Score: 10/10

I did have to put in a few extra bucks for this movie, but hell yeah it was worth it!