I Saw the Devil (2010) Review: Revenge Without an Exit

Is I Saw the Devil worth watching?

Yes, for viewers with strong stomachs. I Saw the Devil is a ferociously well-made revenge thriller, and one of the few that genuinely interrogates the appetite for vengeance it feeds. Kim Jee-woon stages a cat-and-mouse contest between Lee Byung-hun’s grieving agent and Choi Min-sik’s monstrous killer with extraordinary control, and both performances are superb. The warning is just as important: the violence is relentless and graphic, and at 144 minutes the film tests endurance as much as nerve.

What is I Saw the Devil about?

I Saw the Devil opens on a snowy night, when a young woman waiting beside her broken-down car on a dark road is approached by a driver offering help. She is the fiancée of Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a secret agent, and the stranger is Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), a serial killer who has been preying on women for years. Her father (Jeon Gook-hwan), a retired police chief, is devastated; Soo-hyun takes leave from his job and quietly begins his own hunt.

Finding the killer is not the point. Soo-hyun wants him to suffer, again and again, and the film follows what happens when a trained professional decides to turn punishment into a game. Kim Jee-woon directs this South Korean production in Korean, from a screenplay by Park Hoon-jung. It runs 144 minutes.

Kim Jee-woon’s precision in the dark

Kim is one of Korea’s great genre stylists, and here he works with remarkable discipline. The frozen landscapes, lonely roads and fluorescent-lit interiors give the film a chilly, desolate beauty, and the camera moves with a confidence that turns even brief encounters into set pieces. A sequence inside a moving taxi, filmed with a circling camera as violence erupts, is among the most breathtaking pieces of action staging of its era.

Crucially, Kim never lets the style become glamour. Violence is loud, messy and exhausting, and the sound design makes every blow land. The film’s rhythm, quiet stretches punctured by sudden brutality, keeps the audience permanently tense.

Two actors at full power

Lee Byung-hun plays Soo-hyun almost entirely through suppression. Grief barely surfaces on his face; instead it hardens into a terrible focus, and Lee lets us see, in small moments, how much the mission is costing him. It is a controlled, frightening performance that makes the hero harder to root for as the film goes on, which is precisely the point.

Choi Min-sik, the star of Oldboy, is his opposite: sweaty, crude, contemptuous and horribly alive. He never asks for sympathy, but he makes Kyung-chul watchable, even darkly funny in his indignation, which is its own kind of horror. The collision between Lee’s cold rage and Choi’s animal energy is the film’s engine.

Where the extremity becomes the point, and the problem

The title comes with a question: who is the devil? The film’s moral argument, that revenge corrodes the person who pursues it, is clear and powerful. But I Saw the Devil also sometimes seems to enjoy its own excess. A mid-film detour pushes the violence close to grand guignol, and some viewers will feel that the film wants to have it both ways, condemning brutality while serving it up at great length. The treatment of female victims, many of whom exist only to suffer, is also hard to defend.

Who should watch I Saw the Devil?

This is for committed fans of Korean thrillers and extreme genre cinema, and for viewers interested in how revenge films can be turned against their audience. It is emphatically not for anyone sensitive to graphic violence, torture, sexual assault or cannibalism, all of which feature. Set aside two and a half hours and a mood for something punishing.

If you can take it, try these next:

• Oldboy, Park Chan-wook’s revenge landmark, with Choi Min-sik on the other side of the equation.
• The Chaser, Na Hong-jin’s grimy serial-killer thriller, which shares the same furious energy and distrust of institutions.

The verdict

I Saw the Devil is brutal, exhausting and brilliantly directed, a revenge thriller that leaves its audience as shaken as its hero. Its excesses and its thinly drawn victims keep it from perfection, but Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik give two of the most intense performances in modern Korean cinema, and few films make vengeance look so hollow.

Rating: 4.5/5