I Saw the Devil

There's no denying that I Saw the Devil is a masterful film, but it's also relentlessly brutal and ugly and, finally, disappointing. With A Tale of Two Sisters (horror) and A Bittersweet Life (gangster), South Korean director Kim Jee-won has proven himself a brilliant craftsman, and an expert at tweaking genre conventions. I Saw the Devil is his take on the serial-killer movie. Choi Min-sik of Oldboy plays the irredeemably evil Kyung-chul, who brutally murders the pregnant fiancée of Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a federal agent. Soo-hyun vows revenge, using every asset at his disposal to identify the killer. Then, instead of simply murdering Kyung-chul, Soo-hyun decides to let him go, tormenting him in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse. Kim directs action and suspense sequences with stylish gusto, and visually, this ranks with his best work. But he wasn't involved in writing the script, and that's where the film falls down. Kim tries to distill the genre to its essence. Characterization is minimized, and since we never quite understand why these two deranged men behave as they do, the movie begins to feel mechanical, like a distended exercise in senseless brutality. I Saw the Devil is effective in the sense that by the time it's over, the whole genre feels beaten and exhausted.