Revenge like anything is best served when in intricate doses. Batman, The Punisher, Freddy Krueger, they didn’t elicit their revenge in bouts of quick murder and or suicide. They instead withheld the final blow for as long as they possibly could and made the experience about as painful and immensely grueling as possible before the final closing shot. That’s the case for “I Saw the Devil” one of the most finely tuned revenge films ever created. It’s not just a movie about a man on a rampage looking for the monster who destroyed his life. It’s about a man embracing his inner most monsters and destroying the life of the man who took great pleasure in ruining his.
When injecting him with a GPS device after a vicious beating and foiling of another potential murder, special agent Kim Soo Heyon vows to ruin every aspect of Kyung-Chul’s life, tracking him in every sorted affair. And when he does, the consequences of their meetings end in blood shed and broken bones. Director Jee-woon Kim’s horror masterpiece is a revenge thriller of the highest order and one I took great pleasure in indulging in. Because at the end of the day when life has been taken, sometimes it isn’t enough. Kim begs the question, when is enough actually enough? What do you do when’ve savored that final blow and made sure to impair your menace as much as humanly possible? And when does the hunt eventually just become pure and utter sadism?
For Soo-hyeon it’s not so much a matter of avenging his wife who was brutally mutilated at the hands of the psychotic Kyung Chul for reasons never verified, but drawing out the pain and punishment long enough to make every hack and slash feel as if it lasted for decades. This inevitably becomes the meaning of the relationship between the two men pictured, both of whom have embraced their monsters and find that they’re doomed to be at war over the course of the film as Hyeon catches and releases Chul every few miles after a vicious beating allowing him to regain his confidence, and then regaling in the hunt every chance he can grasp. It allows for a cat and mouse between the men whom are at incredible unforgivable odds with one another yet can’t seem to stop luring one another in to their eternal game of cat and mouse that begins in surprises and ends in pure misery for the prey.
Like the modern revenge films, Director Jee-woon Kim doesn’t necessarily spotlight revenge as a sensationalized form of reparations, but a rotting orifice of the human soul that can consume and infect even the purest of us. And when “I Saw the Devil” ends, it’s a film that never relents in its ugliness and compelling state of affairs between two men, one of whom revels in his madness, while the other is just embracing it. Which character can defined as the former or the later remains fuzzy until the very end of the film. These are the types of revenge films I dream of, it’s a compelling and intricate tale blood soaked vengeance where no one wins and everyone loses. Even the madmen of the piece. “I Saw the Devil” is a masterpiece of thriller and horror cinema, and one of the best theatrical releases of 2011.