REVIEW: I SAW THE DEVIL

Just saw it. It's late, so I'll go into more detail later, but I'll drop this off:
 

Someone called this "The first great movie of 2011." I totally agree. This is probably one of the most disgusting, brutal, violent, bloody, dark, mesmerizing and deep movies ever that still maintains itself as a crowd-pleaser. I LOVED it.

I'm with you Josh.  I just wasn't all that taken with the movie. 

Just got back from seeing this and I liked it a lot. If for no other reason that they're both South Korean, I can't help but compare this film to Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy. Unfortunately, against those films I Saw The Devil can't quite hit those thematic highs. There's been a lot of vengenace cinema as of late-- and not just in the US and Korea. So I think it's okay to be a bit picky. But what this film does very well is tap into a pretty strong vein of horror. There's great tension and scariness to a lot of the sequences. And the gore is really well done. Of course, Choi Min-sik's Kyung-Chul is a memorable screen villain. Even without ever truly understanding what makes him tick, he's still compelling. He rapes them and dismembers them but why is the compulsion so strong now? Has he been going at this pace for most of his adult life? Quite a few bodies are dropped in this film and one would think that given how sloppy he was about disposing of evidence that the cops would've caught on a lot sooner. But whatever, that's not the central issue and Choi just sells the shit of the character anyways.

At first the ending didn't quite work for me. If Soo-Hyun is trying to get revenge on Kyung-Chul, then why bring Kyung-Chul's family into it? It's established early on that he clearly doesn't give a shit about them. Setting all that up seems more cruel to the family. But then, I suppose that's the point. Kyung-Chul is right in that he's succeeded in turning an honest cop into a monster.

I read it as that bringing Kyung-Chul's family into it was cruel because a part of him does care about his family.  He has a sick compulsion, of course... but I think he has deliberately tried to keep his family away from that part of his life.  I think he does give a shit about them. 

If Soo-Hyun has it in himself to become a monster, can't a monster have a heart?

It is cruel to the family.  And that's why the final revenge works.

Fantastic. Kim here continues in the Chan-wook Park tradition of vengeance by making what's sure to be one of the best movies about revenge of the year and maybe even the decade, one that's brutal and unrelentingly ugly but beautifully and masterfully crafted at the same time. It's compelling in its hideousness, too, supplementing the inhumanity and cruelty and violence of the narrative with a really human and emotional undercurrent. And of course I can't say no to Min-sik Choi even at the worst of times, this being such a time as he turns the vicious Kyung-chul into a magnetic and electric force of destruction. He's ridiculously watchable and entertaining. Great performance contrasted by Byung-hun Lee's much more focused, quiet charisma, the same kind he brought to A Bittersweet Life; Lee makes Soo-hyun a man capable of scaling walls and swinging around poles to plant a foot into his foe's face without taking away his emotional core. Honestly, the film's biggest draw might be watching these two incredible actors square off against one another.

I liked the film's parade of serial killers and almost didn't want it to stop at the cannibalistic Tae-joo; I wondered if Kim meant to make more out of Kyung-chul murdering the two thugs in the cab (as a note, one of the most viscerally exciting moments of the entire movie), and for a bit I thought I Saw the Devil might end up being about Soo-hyun's game of revenge leading him and Kyung-chul to a score of different psychopathic killers. That would have been fun but maybe not as rewarding in the long run.

The entire "don't stare into the abyss" theme about how the quest for vengeance distorts and warps a person's humanity is fairly common among most revenge movies. It's true for I Saw the Devil, of course, but it's not quite as cut-and-dry as "Soo-hyun seeks revenge, Soo-hyun gets revenge, Soo-hyun lowers himself past the level of his enemy". Certainly Soo-hyun does some monstrous things along his journey, and his actions inadvertently inflict misery and death upon innocents caught in his and Kyung-chul's path, but I wouldn't so simply wrap up an analysis of the film with the above quotation. Soo-hyun never loses his humanity-- but he besmirches it and pushes it aside, and it ends up haunting him and punishing him in the movie's final frames. And like Oldboy, to which this movie will inevitably be compared, I Saw the Devil finds humanity in its villain, too, even when he seems to be wholly monstrous. Kyung-chul isn't totally mired in that aforementioned abyss, but he spends the bulk of his waking hours there willfully-- but not remorselessly (if, like me, you believe his tears at the end to be genuine and his immediate rebuke of his own emotion to be nothing but bravado).

Really loved this. Oldboy has long been my favorite movie, for a myriad of reasons, and I think I Saw the Devil hit me as hard as it did for a lot of the exact same reasons, and I suspect it's one I'll want to revisit over and over and over again.

LOVED this movie. That final shot of Byung-hun Lee walking in the rain nearly had me in tears.