Hunter prey

I’ve written about the polished films of Kim Ji-Woon before, and here is possibly his most beautifully shot film yet, the unsettling and gratuitously violent “I Saw the Devil”. It’s one of the best-looking serial killers movies I’ve ever seen, and is aesthetically comparable to both “Seven” and “Zodiac” (both by David Fincher). 

“I Saw the Devil” is not about the hunt, but about the catch and what happens to the prey once caught. Choi Min-sik (“Oldboy”) is Kyung-chul, a sick man with a face that too easily looks kind and caring. One snowy night, he murders a young woman who was stranded by the roadside due to a flat tyre. It turns out that the woman’s fiancée, Kim (Lee Byung-hun), is a policeman. Devastated but coldly focused, Kim puts in two weeks of leave to catch Kyung-chul. As Kim assumes the role of predator as he tracks down Kyung-chul, it is evident that Kim is as much a madman, in his own way, as his nemesis. “Evil”, the movie’s tagline tells us, “lives inside”. It doesn’t take long for Kyung-chul to be caught, and that’s when the film really steps up the gore and depravity (if not the tension). 

“I Saw the Devil” is torture porn. That it looks like a world-class sophisticated thriller does not change the fact that it’s torture porn. At the same time, the film is disappointingly conventional while requiring quite a lot of suspension of disbelief – will a police force wait by the side as one of their own illegitimately hunts down and toys with a stone cold psychopath? And while I can accept that the first victim’s fiancée turns out to be in law enforcement, I cannot buy into him being a near superhuman wall climbing martial arts expert badass. Consequently, “I Saw the Devil” remains rooted in the movie world, and does it not feel as if its terror seeps into the world outside of the movie. This is where Fincher is a master thriller director and easily outclasses Kim. What “Zodiac” also got right is in showing the banality of evil, how tedious it can be, while “Devil” makes evil cinematically horrifying and appealing. 

At almost two and a half hours, “I Saw the Devil” is palpably long but Kim always keeps things (disturbingly) visually interesting and sometimes unnecessarily graphic and misogynistic. Towards the end things get really heated and horrifying as the two madmen attempt to one-up each other, leading up to a disturbing ending with a stunning final shot. All in all, “I Saw the Devil” does its best to be more violent/graphic/shocking than similar genre movies, and in the process shoots itself in the foot. (For a superior, subtle South Korean serial killer movie, see "Memories of Murder".)