I Saw the Devil (2010)

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Halloween Reviews 2020

Director: Jee-woon Kim

Writers: Jee-woon Kim (adaptation), Hoon-jung Park (screenplay)

Stars: Byung-hoon Lee, Min-sik Choi, Joon-hyuk Lee, Moo-Seong Choi, Kap-su Kim, Gook-hwan Jeon, Ho-jin Chun

A secret agent (Lee Byung-hoon) uses surveillance technology to track and torment the serial killer (Choi Min-sik) who murdered his wife (Oh San-ha). 

This intense, graphic film is not for the faint of heart. 

Director Ji Woon-Kim's South Korea seems to be liberally sprinkled with psychopaths, which leads to some of the best set pieces in the film and some moments of very dark comedy. 

The overall tone of the film, however, is very sad and makes the point that revenge is ultimately unsatisfying, dehumanizing to the perpetrator, and can lead down some unexpected paths. 

This excellent thriller suffers from being a bit too long. 

More importantly, I felt it held many of the murder and torture scenes just a beat too long, crossing the line from depicting horrendous acts to vicariously participating in them. 

Of course, that line is very subjective and many viewers will not agree at all or may feel that the line was crossed long before I did. 

Perhaps it was even Ji Woon-Kim's intention to implicate the viewer in the violence as some sort of meta-cognitive point about the voyeurism of film. 

For my taste, this fine movie would have been improved by trimming some of those scenes a bit. 

I understand that the South Korean film board required about ninety seconds to be cut before it could be released there. 

I can imagine just where those cuts may have been.



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