I Saw the Devil (2010)

I had every intention of watching a movie called The Man From Nowhere tonight, but when my friend came over with the DVD, it turned out to be a bad rip-off DVD with terrible illegible subtitles. Let this be a lesson, always by your DVDs and Blurays legit! Luckily he brought over several other movies, so instead we watched I Saw the Devil. This one stars Byung-hun Lee as the hero, and Min-sik Choi as the villain. If you recognize their names, you rock! If not, you may recognize some of the other movies they've been in. All that and more after the jump.


To simply define this film, it's a revenge story, however, it's really not all that simple. Kim Soo-hyeon is a secret agent who has a beautiful wife, and she's pregnant. While he's out on assignment, she is attacked and murdered by Kyung-chul, a serial killer who targets young beautiful women. When Kim Soo-hyeon takes his time off to mourn, what he actually does is pull some strings and use some favors to get information, and he goes in search of his wife's killer. Before long he finds the man responsible, but he doesn't take revenge right away. He knocks Kyung-chul unconscious and puts a tracking device inside him and sets him free. The hunter has become the hunted. But how long can this go on before something goes wrong? It's not wise to underestimate a serial killer.

Kyung-chul played by Min-sik Choi

Most revenge movies I've seen follow the same basic formula, and they usually don't deviate far from it. It's because of this that I found this movie all the more interesting as it flips the roles around to a degree so that the killer is now the victim always being set upon. It was fun to see how frustrated and confused Kyung-chul was getting as Kim Soo-hyeon kept popping up just in time to save another one of Kyung-chul's victims and then horribly injure him just a little bit more. He's beaten and released several times as Kim Soo-hyeon tries to make his wife's killer's life a living Hell. At the same time, though, we see him starting to become like the very thing he hates; a monster.

I thought the acting was really good, from what I could tell. It's not really surprising though since the two main actors have been in quite a number of popular films before. Min-sik Choi was the lead in Oldboy (which I'm debating making Puneet watch at some point), Lady Vengence, and also had a smaller part in Taegukgi (Brotherhood) which I saw earlier in the year. As for Byung-hun Lee, he was in GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which I found to be very fun) and The Good The Bad The Weird which I also saw not too long ago. Interestingly, even though they are totally different, this film and The Good The Bad The Weird were both directed by the same director, Jee-woon Kim.

Byung-hun Lee plays secret agent Kim Soo-hyeon

I found I Saw the Devil to be a refreshing film in the revenge sub-genre of horror and thriller movies. Be warned though, this is a greatly disturbing movie in plenty of ways, and it's extremely violent. There's something primal in seeing a completely heinous and evil man get treated in an equally heinous way. At the same time, this movie is tragic and frightening to realize the levels a good man can sink to in order to fight on equal footing with the devil. Then the question has to be asked, and in the film it is in fact asked, have you really won once that happens? Of course, these are all issues almost every revenge movie will touch on, but I've never seen it done in quite this way. If you like these kinds of movies, you should most definitely check out I Saw the Devil.