‘I Saw the Devil’ 10th Anniversary Review

In 2010, Kim Ji-woon, director of South Korean hits like The Quiet Family (1998) and A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), pushed his own boundaries by miles, creating a film that has over the past decade confounded horror fans by combining hyper-violence with a cinematic poetry that is difficult to equal. Today marks the 10th anniversary of the South Korean release of I Saw the Devil. 

Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun), a secret agent, is on the phone with his fiance, Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha), as she waits on the side of the road for a tow-truck. When a passerby stops and asks if she needs help, she nervously declines. The man doesn’t leave.

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It is this opening scene that sets the bar for the movie—a single gorgeously shot sequence in particular—and over the 130 minutes that follow, Kim continues raising the bar that he himself set. The sequence occurs in Joo-yeon's car, after the passerby, Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), begins his attack, where the camera focuses on Joo-yeon's face, terror in her eyes, as a line of blood trickles down her face. The camera pauses on this moment, and the viewer is confronted with the full weight of what Joo-yeon is feeling. For a few slow seconds, nothing happens. Time stops as the hope that Joo-yeon’s fate may not yet be sealed clashes with her inevitable death. It is a deeply disturbing moment, but one that is unique in the “torture porn” genre, to which I Saw the Devil could easily belong. Rarely are we allowed, even for a few brief seconds, to meditate on the grotesque scene before us. This film, on the other hand, repeats this technique several times and it never gets easier to see.

But I Saw the Devil is much more than a well-shot torture flick. Though Joo-yeon’s death serves as Soo-hyeon’s call to action, the focal point of the plot quickly devolves into an exploration of the erosive nature of revenge on the soul. There’s certainly no shortage of gory action scenes that, by their own accord, are technically impressive bits of camerawork. But it’s the psychological aspect that sets I Saw the Devil apart in the genre. In contrast with other films with a protagonist with “specific sets of skills” (Taken, John Wick, etc.), Soo-hyeon’s quest for vengeance isn’t met with applause. His journey gets him ostracized from his family, his moral fabric is stretched, and the legitimacy of his crusade is challenged. 

The cat-and-mouse dynamic between Soo-hyeon and Kyung-chul is nothing short of Fincheresque (think The Game, Se7en, Gone Girl, or Zodiac), and we rarely know who is in the driver’s seat. It doesn’t hurt that both actors are excellent in their roles—particularly Choi Min-sik in his most high-octane role since 2003’s Oldboy. Kim Ji-woon’s penchant for drawing emotion out of his characters’ faces accentuates the performances, giving every scene a real sense of presence for the viewer.

Though you never stop rooting for Soo-hyeon, there are several times when you have to ask yourself, “Is he going too far? Should I be feeling the way I feel?” There’s no clear path to victory for the viewer, which is a brilliant way to turn the revenge-action genre on its head. It’s a genre that appeals to the viewer’s desire to take matters into their own hands—fulfilling their wish for a renegade type of justice in which we could never actually engage. There is a certain moral ambiguity that is necessarily present in this kind of anti-hero driven film. With I Saw the Devil, however, Kim Ji-woon expertly approaches this ambiguity head-on, challenging our perception of vigilante justice and how we identify with protagonists in these films.

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Article written by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.