Man, Choi Min-sik makes some hard to watch movies. To be fair, I've only seen this and Oldboy, but good lord, they are both rough. Albeit in different ways. He clearly likes hammers though...
I'm pretty much just gonna drop spoilers throughout, so don't read on if you want to watch it blind.
In a nutshell, I Saw the Devil is Taken meets a mixture of Silence of the Lambs and Hostel. The film begins when Kyung-chul kills Joo-yun seeming for her refusing his help with her flat tire (although after finishing the movie, I realized he probably would have killed her anyway). Turns out Joo-yun is the daughter of the former chief of police and her fiancee is a secret service agent (Liam Neeson). Because of this, they pull out all the stops to find her body, which they do, or at least her head. This lead to one of the two laugh out load moments in the otherwise very serious film.
I wish I could find a gif or a video of it, but I can't. But basically, the police put Joo-yun's severed head in a forensics box and the guys carrying the box proceeds to stumble in front of a ton of other police and journalists and the head rolls out. I know it was supposed to be a serious and tragic moment, but holy shit, it was hilarious.
Anyway, Soo-hyun (Joo-yun's fiancee, the secret service agent) receives the police's top suspects from his father-in-law and begins a vigilante spree against them to figure out who was Joo-yun's killer. His first stop is not the killer, but does provide some harsh violence as he interrupts the suspect's masturbation session.
If you didn't watch the clip, then you missed my other laughing moment, right at the end. When the police chief asks the hard-hitting question, "Who broke your balls?" Sometimes, even in the most dreadful moments, you just need a laugh.
Soo-hyun eventually figures out that Kyung-chul is the killer and begins to stalk him via a tracking device on his car. Soo-hyun then interrupts Kyung-chul's current rape and soon to be murder by beating the shit out of him and forcing a gps/microphone pill down his throat. He is then able track Kyung-chul even better, allowing KC (abbreviating now on for my ease) to get patched up at the hospital. Now as if we didn't already know, we see KC continuing to be a monster as he begins to sexually assault the nurse. But thanks to the tracking device, SH shows up and lays an even more severe beatdown on KC, culminating in a scene that left be truly breathless in horror and visceral pain. I'm not even going to try to look for a gif, picture, or video because it was too horrifying, but I'll just say this: scalpel meets Achilles tendon.
Just writing that made me feel icky.
This sick catch and release by SH continues and you see him basically becoming the monster that he is trying to extinguish. You also meet some other horrible characters like a slovenly cannibal. SH wins out in the end, but at such a cost to both his family and conscience that you really question if you can even call it a victory. This is something that KC expresses several times in the final act, but you really don't believe him until the film ends and the dust settles.
Then you're just sitting there. Depressed, horrified, and just generally feeling shitty about everything that was once good in the world. But then I remembered that I'm not a secret service agent, and if my non-existent fiancee were killed, I wouldn't go on a rampage of vengeance. I'd probably just grieve in the normal fashion and try to move on with my life. No moral and mental breakdown for this guy!
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| I didn't mention it yet, but his jacket is really cool. |
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