|
 Horror
film to some, crime drama to others and gory, exploitation flick to still
more. The truth about I Saw the Devil lies somewhere in between, taking
the aspects of all three and turning them into the most outrageous, over
the top, disturbing tale of vengeance seen in many a moon, as well as
the best film I’ve yet seen this year.
It’s
every woman’s nightmare; being stuck in a car with a flat tire on a deserted road. The
young driver is on her cell phone with her fiancé, a secret service
agent who sings to her while she waits for a tow truck, when a stranger
in a short bus stops and offers aid. That seemingly innocuous
invitation will begin the girl’s fiancé and her murderer on a
phantasmagoric chase, alternating their roles as cat and mouse,
torturing one another until bodies pile up on both sides and they tear
each other apart.
Director Kim Ji-woon has made a career of making off-beat films of
great style and tremendous individuality (A Tale of Two Sisters {2003},
The Good, the Bad, the Weird {2008}). It would take a
master’s hand to attempt the amount of gore, sexual deviance and twisted
brutality seen here and make it not only palatable, but brilliant.
Though painted with blood throughout, Kim never loses sight of the main
moral of the story and that is the futility and ultimate
self-destruction brought about by acts of violence and revenge. The
difference in those lessons is you have one character, Kyung-chul, who
is so utterly corrupted that there is nothing to learn from all his
nihilism, and only more chaos satisfies him. Soo-hyun still has a soul
to save, but in his pursuit of his love’s killer, he gets a taste for
what Kyung-chul has experienced for years; having someone utterly at
your mercy, making them less than human and he finds it intoxicating.
It goes beyond wanting to prolong Kyung-chul’s suffering for his crimes,
it’s like a drug Soo-hyun can’t shake and he’ll end up paying for that
jones in ways he could never expect.
Excellent performances help raise I Saw the Devil to its high level.
Lee Byung-hun, as the suffering fiancé turned avenging angel encompasses
all the shock and fury of someone who’s most beloved one was
horrifically brutalised at the hands of a unrepentant psychopath. His
turmoil is real and he can’t stop himself, becoming less human every
time he catches up to Kyung-chul and just lets him go, allowing the
madman to victimise someone else. Jeon Kuk-hwan plays Soo-hyun’s
would-be father-in-law, whose mournful face portrays the shame and anger
this old police chief feels at having saved thousands of lives, but not
being able to protect his own daughter. I Saw the Devil marks the
return to the crime genre of the man who is probably the West’s best
known Korean actor, Choi Min-sik, forever famous as Park Chan-wook’s
Oldboy {2003}. Choi went into a self-imposed cinematic exile in
2006, making only one drama {2008’s With a Girl of Himalaya} in
all that time. In I Saw the Devil, he lets go of all that pent-up
thespian rage. Choi bites into the film like a lion with a brisket,
reveling in the filth of Kyung-chul’s soul, happy to embody a truly
irredeemable villain who feels justified in all his sins and simply will
not stop. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of humour in I Saw the Devil; the
bumbling murder investigation is more evidence a-la Bong Joon-ho that
you really don’t want to depend on the Seoul police department if you’re
in trouble. The rest of the laughs come black as soot from Kyung-chul,
as the raging sociopath turns the many perceived affronts by victims or
soon-to-be victims into twisted comedy gold. The scene where Kyung-chul
gives himself up to police, blazing through the streets in a stolen car
wearing shorts, old canvas slip-ons and a dirty trenchcoat, covered in
blood while waving a huge kitchen knife in one hand and a cigarette in
the other is burned on my retinas forever. So, too, are the scenes that
play like homages to Choi’s magnum opus, Oldboy, particularly a vicious
battle inside a taxi after Kyung-chul meets a couple of fellers who
picked up the wrong degenerate to mess with. Did we really need those
loud smacking noises in both the scenes where Kyung-chul sodomises a
young nurse, or as he’s being hosted to a special dinner by some old
friends? Nope, but it’s all part of the over-the-top cartoon nightmare
Kim is spinning. I Saw the Devil is really a you’re-in-it-or-you’re-not
proposition and most definitely not for the squeamish. Even yours
truly, after years of believing I was inured to the reaches of
envelope–pushing Asian film, found myself a little queasy when it was
all over, but looking back maybe those were butterflies of joy.
Excellent.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
March
4th, 2011
Click here for our Exclusive Interview with I Saw
the Devil director Kim Ji-woon
© 2006-2022 The Diva Review.com |
