I Saw the Devil
Directed By: Kim Jee-Woon
Written By: Park Hoon-Jung and Kim Jee-Woon
Starring: Lee Byung-Hun, Choi Min-Sik, Chun Kook-Haun, and Chun Ho-Jin
Director of Photography: Lee Mogae, Editor: Nam Na-Young, Production Designer: Cho Hwa-Sung, Music: Mowg
Rated: Not Rated, and probably with good reason
Director Kim Jee-Woon really knows how to setup the cruel world his characters exist in. In the opening of his latest film I Saw the Devil, a young woman sits quietly in car as the silent and gorgeous snow falls around her. She’s got a flat tire, and her fiancé sings to her on the phone (though from the quiet bathroom of the secret service mission he is on). Even a nice school bus driver offers to help her change her tire. Unfortunatley, that bus driver is in fact Oldboy star Choi Min-Sik, and he’s a serial killer, who smashes through her windshield. Later, when her body has been bloodied, she pleas with him, telling him she is pregnant. Mr. Choi ignores this fact, and continues his hacking job.
It would be easy to deride Mr. Kim’s sadistic and often unpleasant world for just those reasons, but that is not why I found I Saw the Devil so boring. Mr. Kim, who has taken on multiple genres like the horror (A Tale of Two Sisters) and the western (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird) is the type of director you want to reinvent the way we look at the serial killer genre, a movie type that has been sorely lacking for some time, save for David Fincher’s Zodiac. And with his perfectly crafted sequences, filled with pitch-black humor, Mr. Kim can suck us into the logic of his world. The boyfriend of that poor girl turns out to be Lee Byung-Hun, and he wants revenge.
