Ink and wash drawing titled Tarred Net by Margaret Olley, 1961
Due to some scheduling conflicts (having a baby this week!), my special lady friend and I limited our Sundance Film Festival attendance this year to three films. Of course, this meant that selecting the right films was much more important than usual - I Saw the Devil seemed like a sure thing. For one thing, the film's director Kim Ji-Woon is one of Korea's best-known filmmakers, and I liked both the slow-burning horror film A Tale of Two Sisters and his "spaghetti-Eastern" adventure film The Good, the Bad, and the Weird. Also, this film had a great cast anchored by Oldboy's Choi Min-Sik and JSA's Lee Byung-Hun. Director Kim and the swoon-stastic Lee got up before the screening to welcome us to the show, warning us that we were about to see an ultra-violent film about the limits of revenge. Lee went so far as to request that the audience not walk out of the screening.
Their warnings were easily justified, although I was impressed that I didn't see a single walk-out (although there were plenty of people shielding their eyes for certain scenes). The film begins with a middle-aged loner named Kyung-Chul (Choi) kidnapping a beautiful young girl and dismembering her in a back-woods workshop. When her body parts turn up in a river, the girl's boyfriend Soo-Hyun (Lee), who happens to be a special agent for Korea's National Intelligence Service, decides to go on a "revenge sabbatical" from his day job. Seem a little over the top? Kim Ji-Woon is not really known for his subtle touch, and I Saw the Devil is right in line with his typical approach, with plenty of overly dramatic music and borderline melodrama. Anyone expecting a slow-burning crime drama like Bong Joon-Ho's brilliant Mother and Memories of Murder will be disappointed, but that isn't really a fair comparison to make.
The over-the-topness of Kim's style is essential to what makes I Saw the Devil interesting. By setting the movie up as a face-off between a deadly secret agent and a remorseless sociopathic killer, Kim is able to play with the structure of the typical "revenge" movie in interesting and often humorous ways. The amped-up twists and turns of the plot are mirrored by the amped-up violence, which works up to a point but then threatens to cross over into "torture porn" territory. What saves the movie from descending into pure grotesquerie, though, is in the performances of the two extremely charismatic leads - Choi and Lee are both a lot of fun to watch, and they get to do some great Korean-style scenery-chewing in I Saw the Devil.
It's worth noting that this movie, in its original cut, was banned from theaters in Korea for "damaging the dignity of human values." I'm not sure if we saw the original edit or the modified one that eventually got released in Korea, but it was fairly extreme. I wouldn't recommend it for any squeamish movie fans - this is one for the "Asia extreme" crowd, although any iron-stomached fan of modern Korean cinema will find some great acting and humor in I Saw the Devil, under a liberal coating of human entrails.
"Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones
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