I Saw the Devil

Bloody revenge melodramas have become a staple of Korean cinema, but Jee-woon Kim's I Saw the Devil takes the genre about as far as it can go. The premise: police detective Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-hun Lee) wants to avenge the murder of his girlfriend—daughter of the retired police chief—at the hands of vicious serial killer Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi). To make the man suffer, the cop literally plants a tiny GPS system inside the culprit so that he can follow the murderer around and repeatedly brutalize him. This leads to a chain of gory fight sequences, each more vicious than the last, although the villain eventually turns the tables on his tormentor, allowing for still more grisly confrontations. The movie seems designed to show how a good person can be driven to evil acts, but it's really just a macabre epic of bloodletting, dismemberment, and perversion (including cannibalism), dexterously choreographed and elegantly shot. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, I Saw the Devil may prove too much even for aficionados (many will find it very hard to stomach), but for its genre, this is very well done. Recommended. (F. Swietek)