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".)

A Spanish ghost, one Korean badass and a 1950s psycho

I was properly dissatisfied to discover that during last week's outage, Blogger had lost three painstakingly prepared movie reviews. Since I cannot afford the time to rewrite all three reviews, I've decided on short 'capsules' on each: "The Orphanage", "A Bittersweet Life" and "The Killer Inside Me".

Nobody put baby in the corridor.

"The Orphanage" is a ghost story for those who claim that they don't make ghost stories like they used to. Married couple Laura (Belen Rueda) and Carlos (Fernando Cayo) purchase an old mansion to eventually make it into a place of care and attention for special needs children. The couple’s young son, Simon (Roger Princep), soon starts talking about friends that only he can see. Before long, tragedy strikes, and Laura realises that certain things are beyond what she knows and accepts as real. The past is never dead. “The Orphanage” is one of the most richly atmospheric scary films I’ve seen in a long time. Directed by JA Bayona and produced by genre aficionado Guillermo del Toro, this supernatural thriller is exquisitely shot, with a sense of foreboding so strong than when the horrific payoff comes, it’s a climax well earned. It’s the best film of its kind since “The Devil’s Backbone” (which is actually less scary than this film) and the claustrophobic “The Others” (made by another Spanish filmmaker, Alejandro Amenabar). Watch out for an incredibly well constructed séance scene featuring Geraldine Chaplin.

La Dolce Vita

Kim Sun-woo works for a hotel magnate. The boss orders him to look after his mistress while he's away on business, and adds that should something go wrong - as in, should she cheat on the hotel magnate - Kim should kill her. When push indeed comes to shove, Kim realises that he is not an emotionless killing machine (could've fooled me), fails to follow through on the order, and finds himself in deep trouble. Kim Ji-woon, he of the magnificent gunplay of "The Good, the Bad and the Weird", made waves at Cannes in 2005 with "A Bittersweet Life", which has since become quite the cult favourite. This film is a stylish mix of gangster tropes and a full-on vengeance narrative, where the issue is not so much "Why is a character doing this?" but "Really, how much does it take to kill someone?" The hero of the film, Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun), is a simple man, and far from immortal; he takes a lot of damage throughout the course of the film. He is a man of simple pleasures: a fresh espresso, a bullet through the head. Both provide a particular thrill. In one of my favourite pieces of dialogue from any action movie, a driver asks Kim about the noises he heard coming from an apartment Kim had just come from, and the hero replies: it was "a hole ripping through a person". The film is brutal and violent, but cinematically so, as prescribed by the genre. This isn't anything like the unsettling imagery of "The Killer Inside Me".

The eyes of Lou Ford

Few directors can claim as diverse a resume as British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, whose “Welcome to Sarajevo” helped inform my political consciousness in the mid 1990s, and whose hilarious “A Cock and Bull Story” is a favourite comedy from the 2000s. Now he goes semi-noir with the controversial “The Killer Inside Me”, a tale of a psychopathic deputy sheriff in the 1950s, Lou Ford (Casey Affleck). Ford is assigned to chase away a prostitute (Jessica Alba) who services clients at the edge of the town. One anticipates that the two of them will develop some sort of relationship, but one cannot foresee the violence that erupts from the situation. There are only two scenes of violence in the film, but they are the most unsettling of their kind I’ve seen in a long time, forcing the viewer to distinguish between violence and action. (Stephane Zacharek from Salon wrote a strong but not entirely convincing essay on the film and its “conscienceless camera”). Based on the novel by Jim Thompson, this glimpse into psychopathy is not for everyone.