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".)

An angel in the ashes

Image: www.slant.com

The BBC’s “Red Riding” project, based on the novels by David Peace, is a project of such scope that it resulted in three directors tackling the material in three different chapters. “The Red Riding Trilogy”, as it was then called, runs at a total of 298 minutes. The three entries (by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker) span a decade and are called by their years: “1974”, “1980” and “1983”.  The first part deals with death and betrayal; the second with defeat and disintegration; the third, finally, attempts some sort of redemption (it may well be too late from some characters). It originally screened as a mini-series on the BBC in 2009 and had special theatrical screenings in the US the following year.

On its surface, “Red Riding” is a serial killer narrative and a police procedural; viewers should pay attention to all details in the three movies as seemingly minor characters and events obtain significance later. In “1974”, Andrew Garfield is a young journalist investigating the murder of a girl who had swan wings stitched onto her back. His investigation reveals a conspiracy which extends into the second film, “1980”, where Paddy Considine (so memorable in the family drama “In America”) stars as a top cop assigned to catch the Yorkshire Ripper.

Finally, everything comes to a full in “1983”, where a washed up lawyer (Mark Addy) and desperate policeman (David Morrissey) unknowingly collaborate to bring closure to certain events. Underlying the whole series is the idea of some major conspiracy that involves rampant police corruption and various forms of unethical conduct. As is the case with many successful trilogies, the full impact of the story only hits when the entries are seen as a whole, and it makes “Red Riding” one of the most impressive film projects of the past few years.

The different eras are convincingly recreated through design and grading, and the stories are sensitively told by some of Britain’s foremost directors. Their imagery is impressive, detailed and nuanced; seldom has a falling snowflake seemed so utterly desolate, or an interrogation room so much like a torture pit. Make sure you can afford to put aside either a whole day or two successive evenings to watch one of the finest thrillers to come from the UK.

South Africans can order “The Red Riding Trilogy” from www.amazon.co.uk for close to R120 for the 3-disc set. Note that it comes with almost no extras, no option for subtitles and inferior sound quality.

Scene of the crime

Bong Joon-ho's "Memories of Murder" (2003) is the film that put him on the map internationally. His later hits, mainly the creature-feature "The Host" (2006), would make him part of Asian mainstream worldwide. Entertaining as "The Host" was, it's got nothing on the grim, tightening hold of "Memories of Murder". The film plays out like a Korean version of David Fincher's "Zodiac" (2007), a police procedural where viewer frustration is closely aligned with the frustration experienced by the police as they try to catch a serial killer in rural South Korea in 1986.

Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung and Kim Roe-ha star as the investigating detectives. One is boorish and clumsy, with flexible ethical standards; the other is out-and-out physically intimidating; the third is from Seoul and seems more sophisticated than his colleagues, though it's unclear how long this sophistication will last. Inspired by real life events, the plot seems simple: we meet the main characters and follow them in their investigation. Seeing as this is first and foremost a character driven film, we find the characters unravelling as their search keeps turning up false leads and invalid conclusions, and it is this frustration of intent and expectation that creates the film's tension. Also to this film's credit is its constant awareness of what was politically happening in Korea during the 1980s, and how the police was forced to cope without the high-end technological advances that were already available elsewhere in the world.

"Memories of Murder" is compelling. It juxtaposes brutal death with rural tranquility, a motif that comes full circle with the film's powerful and moving ending. We are made to think that sometimes we see the killer, but we cannot be sure since we're only privy to what the detectives know. Once, we are shown the killer for certain, his face blurred and in the distance as he hides in the lush, tall grass. Bong makes the most of the tension derived from contrasting human threat and beautiful nature by putting the one in the other.

More "Zodiac" than "Seven" (Fincher, 1995), the film's even pacing and character focus is on par with that of under appreciated, quiet thriller "Citizen X" (Chris Gerolmo, 1995) where the Soviet government effectively undermined the search for a serial killer because they refused to believe that such evil was possible in their country. In "Memories", it is, in the end, not so much the lack of resources and cooperation that sabotage the murder investigation as the humanity and fragility of the detectives.