I Saw The Devil Review

• 4th May 2011

I Saw the Devil begins with the most hackneyed of horror movie clichés, but like the protagonists you would be a damn fool to underestimate where this gore soaked, balls-to-the-wall thriller is going. Once again Korean cinema achieves what Hollywood can only dream of doing: taking an utterly preposterous premise and spinning it into both a modern fable about the perils of accessing the darkest reaches of your soul to assist you in a noble cause, and a near-documentary about the many, many ghastly fates that are worse than death.

Beautiful Joo-yeon has had the misfortune to breakdown late at night on an isolated country road. It’s snowing and the tow truck will take a while, so she kills time by talking on the phone to her fiancé, Kim Soo-hyeon. It’s not really clear at this point what Soo-hyeon does for a living, but it involves wearing a dark suit and hanging out in a hotel room with a lot of other guys in dark suits. Mid-conversation, a school bus driver pulls over and taps on Joo-yeon’s window to offer assistance, which she declines. Soo-hyeon advises her to sit tight and wait for the tow truck, locks himself in the bathroom so he can sing to her a bit (sweet!), apologises for not being able to be with her on her birthday and rings off. Then the bus driver comes back, armed with a hammer. This time he’s not here to help.

Joo-yeon turns out to be a well-connected victim: that fiancé of hers is a National Intelligence agent and her father is a retired police chief. Soo-hyeon decides to take two weeks off work and advantage of Joo-yeon’s father’s access to police files in order to track down her killer and make him pay – with interest.

From here on in, director Jee-woon Kim never takes his foot off the accelerator. In a taste of things to come, even the tale of Joo-yeon’s grisly demise is stretched out to breaking point and then just a teensy bit further: let’s just say that in the world of I Saw the Devil, death is not the end.

A gripping, and very violent, game of cat and mouse unfolds: the great twist being that the mouse is a serial killer and sexual sadist, and the cat is in moral turmoil as his taste for bloody vengeance starts to eat him alive. Soo-hyeon, played by Korean heartthrob Byung-hun Lee, and Min-sik Choi (the Old Boy himself) as Kyung-Chul seem to revel in the sheer physicality of their roles. No wonder by the end I felt like I needed a nap. Less assured films would have you wondering how on earth it is that the police can’t catch either of them, what with the huge piles of bodies that they’re leaving in their wake like some sick version of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, but Kim isn’t making a police procedural. He doesn’t give a fat rat’s about those sort of humdrum details and he doesn’t give you time to think about them either. By making Kyung-Chul such an evil sod, you can’t help but hope for Soo-hyeon to turn up and deal out his own form of exquisite agony. Kim makes the audience complicit in Soo-hyeon’s crimes and, worse than that, cheer on his weakening grip on his own humanity.

Every scene culminates in a visceral punch of such magnitude that a creeping suspicion developed that Kim had nothing left for the dénouement. Well, as Soo-hyeon and Kyung-Chul keep assuring each other, it is not wise to underestimate your opponent. “I fear nothing. Pain has no meaning to me. So what are you going to do?” The answer is, of course, disgusting, morally reprehensible and a fitting reward for any audience member who has survived the preceding 141 minutes without curling up in a corner and whimpering for a nurse. You will never look at anyone wearing headphones the same way again.

Clare Moody