3. I Saw the Devil (2010)
Trimmed by three minutes or so in South Korea for the relentless violence, even in its cut form this is an ordeal of epic proportions. It’s a shame that South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon had to come to Hollywood and get unstuck with The Last Stand, as the two films he had made in South Korea before then were absolutely wonderful. I Saw The Devil is miles apart from the frothy western adventure fun of The Good, The Bad, The Weird but is probably a better film overall. Perhaps too relentless and challenging to ever go mainstream, for a while it seemed like this was going to get a cinema release because of all the buzz but then just went to DVD instead. It’s a shame because this kind of thing used to go down a storm in smaller cinemas in London, but times change I guess. I Saw the Devil concerns sick and deranged school bus driver Kyung-Chul (Choi Min-Sik) who kills a woman whose car breaks down one night, problem is the woman’s fiancé just so happens to be secret service agent Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-Hun Lee) who isn’t going to take this lying down. He tracks down Kyung-Chul and instead of swiftly exacting vengeance, he prolongs the agony, beating Kyung-Chul to near death every time he gets near a new victim, reviving him and letting him go and then starting the process again until Kyung-Chul catches on of course.
This is revenge cinema in the way that South Korea does best, a brutal and challenging piece of cinema that has an effect on the way you view on-screen violence. The punishment of a despicable human being dished out by our supposed hero is so relentless and so savage that after a while you just want it to stop and it asks questions of the audience in a much better and subtle manner than Michael Haneke did with Funny Games. Even viewed as a simple cat and mouse thriller, this is stirring and exhilarating stuff with remarkable performances from the two leads and one of those devastating endings that leaves you reeling.
