I Saw the Devil

Though saddled with an often unreasonably overlong running time, I Saw the Devil ultimately manages to establish itself as a gritty, brutal, and consistently uncompromising thriller that does, for the most part, feel like South Korea’s answer to Se7en. The straight-forward storyline follows malicious serial killer Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi) as he murders the pregnant wife of a government agent (Byung-hun Lee’s Kim Soo-hyeon), with the movie subsequently detailing Kim Soo-hyeon’s ongoing (and progressively convoluted) efforts at avenging his beloved’s senseless death. I Saw the Devil kicks off with a striking sequence that certainly proves effective at immediately capturing the viewer’s interest, with the strength of this opening initially compensating for filmmaker Jee-woon Kim’s decidedly laid-back sensibilities. There’s little doubt, however, that the movie’s excessively deliberate atmosphere is increasingly compounded by padded-out and downright needless sequences, which, as a result, ensures that the the film’s first hour is rarely as engrossing or as compelling as one might’ve hoped. The rough-cut vibe persists up until around the halfway mark, after which point Kim slowly-but-surely begins suffusing the narrative with one admittedly engrossing sequence after another – with Kim Soo-hyeon’s electrifying assault on Kyung-chul’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like homestead certainly standing as a high point within the proceedings. From there, I Saw the Devil moves like a rocket right through to Kim Soo-hyeon and Kyung-chul’s expectedly intense final confrontation – thus cementing the movie’s place as a pervasively uneven yet sporadically stirring (and often astonishingly violent) piece of work.

*** out of ****