Review of I Saw the Devil / 악마를 보았다, directed by Kim Jee-woon

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

When it comes to blogging, or even watching movies and whatnot, I’ve been in such a weird headspace lately. I started a new job after quite a bit of a spell of not having any besides freelance and contract work, and now that I am actually working, I’m not watching as much as I used.

Part of it is fueled by my newfound YouTube addiction, but part of it just is that I can’t stay awake long enough to get everything I want done. I haven’t even been going to the movies lately to see them in-person because I simply am just tired after I get everything else done.

Call this a regular phase of corporate America and adulting, but I want to find a balance and go back more to the things I love. Sometimes life is simply trying to find a balance between the things that keep you alive, providing food, shelter, and warmth, and the things that you actually want to spend your life enjoying.

Anyways, I watched I Saw the Devil during one of my late night sessions where I was trying to fit in a movie or two. It’s such a shame in so many ways that I haven’t seen this movie before now, especially considering I worked as a critic and specialized in Korean cinema. I’ve written about the basic synopsis of this movie, but never really had the chance to see it.

Let’s get into the review! I can see this introduction getting a little long, and I don’t want you, my dear reader, to miss out on the main part of the post.

After his fiancee is brutally murdered, a policeman goes on his own journey of revenge against the killer.

This movie opens up with a scene of tragedy. Jang Joo-yun is driving at night, in the snow, when she ends up with a flat tire. As she talks to her fiance on the phone about it, he advises her to not listen to the man coming up to her window, who happens to be Jang Kyung-chul. When she refuses him again, he breaks the window and drags her back to his house.

There, he dismembers and kills her, then dumps the body parts into a stream nearby. Her fiance, Kim Soo-hyun, and her father are a part of the police force looking for her in the stream after reports of body parts being found, then they realize that’s their loved one. A livid Soo-hyun swears revenge against whoever does this, which leads him to crossing some ethical boundaries.

It’s when he’s searching Kyung-chul, who’s one of the suspects, he finds his fiancee’s ring in his house. Soo-hyun waits until he comes home, and Kyung-chul, when he comes back, rapes a school student. Soo-hyun doesn’t kill him and instead forces him to swallow a tracker so he can monitor him.

When Kyung-chul wakes up he hails a taxi and kills the driver and his passenger. He then goes to a clinic, rapes a nurse there, and Soo-hyun shows up and slashes at his achilles tendon. Kyung-chul visits one of his fellow messed up buddies, a murderer, who tells him that someone must know one of his victims and wants revenge.

Kyung-chul then realizes it’s Soo-hyun, who shows up and attacks them. His buddy is arrested with his girlfriend, but Kyung-chul is treated by one of Soo-hyun’s friends who helps them get out of the situation. He overhears Soo-hyun and his friend talking about the tracker, and he decides to takes laxatives to get the tracker out of his body

He then puts it on a random driver at a rest stop, then Soo-hyun realizes who is going to be his next victim. He kills Kyung-chul’s friend, and as this happens, Kyung-chul kills Se-yun, his fiancee’s younger sister, and attacks her father. He then surrenders to the police, but an enraged Soo-hyun intercepts him and takes him to his house.

There he tortures Kyung-chul and builds a guillotine. He leaves him there, but when we all find out that his son and parents are here trying to visit him, his tune changes. His family comes through the door as he’s beheaded, and Soo-hyun, who is listening to their cries of sadness and shock, has a breakdown.

The movie ends with him walking away from what happened.

Overall Thoughts

I had always heard about how this movie is a classic Korean revenge thriller, and that it’s a bit insane. I quite agree with both of those sentiments, especially considering how this evokes a lot of the Korean revenge movies of the early to late 2000s—I would argue this is one of the last great movies from that period, even it’s the tail end of it.

Anyways, I enjoyed watching this. Or, at least, how much you can enjoy watching a movie like this. There are some really gorgeous shots and blocking throughout this, even with some of the more extreme violence, and I was stunned at the horrific beauty that was contained within this film.

I do think both of the male leads were compelling enough to drive and elevate this movie to new levels. If Lee and Choi weren’t as good as they were, I don’t know if I would have liked this as much as I did.

Go watch it if you have the chance! I think this is a movie worth watching at least once if you can stomach it.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.