A Belated 31 Nights of Horror: Night Eleven, "I Saw the Devil"

​To paraphrase Park Chan-wook, all great dramas are revenge movies. He may not have had a hand in I Saw the Devil, but his philosophy is all over it, buoying it to the top of a truly stellar heap of Korean revenge-thrillers that includes Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser, Lee Jung-beom’s The Man From Nowhere, and Chan-wook’s own Vengeance Trilogy, built on this principle: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Lady Vengeance, and Oldboy.

At just shy of two-and-a-half hours, I Saw the Devil is a veritable horror epic, an immaculately shot cat-and-mouse that moves with the grace of a drama at the pace of an action movie. It begins with the murder of a woman one snowy night, introducing us to the movie’s villain, Kyung-Chul, who will be a familiar face to fans of Chan-wook’s Shakespearean Oldboy. Choi Min-sik’s character is the inverse of the man he played in that movie: an evil, oafish monster, his disregard for human life is made brutally clear when he slaughters the woman, Se-jung, even after she reveals she’s pregnant. What Kyung-Chul doesn’t know at the time, but finds out very quickly and very painfully, is that Se-jung’s fiancee, Kim Soo-hyun, is an NIS agent whose grief doesn’t take long to harden into bloodthirsty resolve. And so the movie begins.

I Saw the Devil has the lurid tone of a Punisher comic as scribed by, well, Park Chan-wook, brimming with stylish hand-to-hand combat and gory detours to such unexpected locales as the back room of a doctor’s office, the front seat of a taxicab, and a greenhouse with a dark secret, among many other highlight scenes. The purposeful ambiguity of the movie’s title comes to mind more and more often with each subsequent cruelty. I’m not sure whether it’s a direct translation of the movie’s Korean title, but I can say that it’s English title is wholly appropriate. As the atrocities stack and the intensity ratchets up, who’s the devil, and who’s really seeing him?

-Brian L.