Movies / Home Theatre

I Saw the Devil DVD and Blu-Ray

By Dan Horn
June 10, 2011 - 11:19

South Korean cinema has always seemed to have a proclivity toward artfully balancing insightful human drama and the brutal violence it often begets, as demonstrated in the modern classics Oldboy and A Bittersweet Life and too a lesser extent earnest, but cluttered and meandering films like The Chaser. The man responsible for the aforementioned A Bittersweet Life and others including the horror yarn A Tale of Two Sisters and the treasure hunter caper The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, director Kim Jee-woon continues the sterling legacy of genre-bending, stomach-turning thrillers to come out of Southeast Asia with his latest offering, I Saw the Devil.

After his pregnant fiance is murdered by a serial killer, resourceful special agent Soo-hyeon takes sabbatical to hunt down the felon. Armed with a dossier of the police department's four lead suspects, a miniature GPS tracking device, and his own formidable martial arts proficiency, he begins mercilessly weeding out possible culprits from the guilty party. However, once he's found his man, Soo-hyeon leaves him unconscious, bugged, and in possession of an envelope of cash, setting in motion a ferocious game of cat and mouse. But, as the killer, Kyung-chul, begins piecing together the identity of his ruthless hunter, Soo-hyeon finds that in revenge there may not always be a clear victor.

Lee Byung-hun (GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Three... Extremes) plays the morally embattled Soo-hyeon masterfully, his emoting sympathetically palpable, even as cold, calculating vengeance sets in and hollows him out. He makes the nearly preposterous premise instantly believable with his creditable humanity and sincere performance.

His inverse, Kyung-chul, is impeccably portrayed in all his nefarious narcissism by Choi Min-sik, the notorious Oh Dae-su of Oldboy. Kyung-chul is the most sinister of villains, a scrupulous obsessive, a madman growing madder with each passing moment, an unstable powder keg with a short fuse that is cut even shorter as his depraved match of wits with the film's protagonist spirals toward it's inexorably grim coup de grace.

The supporting cast is comprised of an ensemble of fantastic actors. Never once is the ball dropped here, from Choi Moo-sung's terrifying portrayal of Kyung-chul's friend Tae-joo, the disturbed cannibal, to Jeon Kuk-hwan's remorseful father figure. Even the extras seem as though they are the actual unwitting participants of the movie's deadly tournament.

Unrelentingly savage and suspenseful, I Saw the Devil is a Hitchcockian thriller on crack and doused in buckets of gore. Director Kim, always the purist, and his SFX makeup guru, Kwak Tae-young, rarely take shortcuts via idiotic CGI effects, in turn creating a viscerally bright and realistic menagerie. It's incredible the deftness some of the very difficult effects in this film are employed with. The cinematography and lighting are also the stuff festival awards were made for, subtly framing every shot in their appropriately unnerving Anschauung.

Though the bounds of believability are, in the grandiose fashion of most action thrillers, pushed almost to their respective breaking points at least once along the way, I Saw the Devil retains an unvarnished plausibility in regards to its characters and a white-knuckle tension that will make your skin crawl. This is one of the best films in this vein of cinema that I've seen. Never the droll, abstract melodrama you expect of foreign filmmaking, and never quite the torture porn you hear Korean photoplay often being unjustly accused of, I Saw the Devil represents a rare Asian motion picture epic that's easily accessible even with discerning American tastes. It may not seem groundbreaking when considering the long heritage of ultra-violent Korean revenge flicks that have reared it, but unlike so many others, even the sacred Oldboy, this is a sleek, systematic plot uninhibited by that earmark Seoul-scene convolution. I Saw the Devil is a revenge parable that's admirably outgrown its predecessors' long shadows.

Special Features:
-Deleted Scenes
-Raw and Rough: Behind the Scenes of I Saw the Devil

Rating: 9 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12