Cinema September 7: I Saw The Devil

But I Didn’t Really Want To

CW: torture, sexual assault, rape, murder

Whenever the subject of Game of Thrones comes up, I always joke that I’ve never given it a go because I “just really don’t like rape”. Normally people can understand that what I mean by this is that I don’t personally enjoy media which portrays extreme sexual violence. I don’t have a problem with other types of violence on screen—often, I relish it—but this particular type doesn’t sit well with me. And sometimes, other forms of violence don’t either. When what is portrayed on screen is lingering, or particularly sadistic, I find it much more difficult to watch than a standard zombie chomping through a major artery.

This is, of course, a subjective viewpoint, and I think there is plenty of room for conversations around what violence gets shown in stories, and how. I don’t think I could ever condone a total censorship of violent imagery, because it would make certain necessary stories (for example, historical) impossible to tell. Also, it is clearly a totally constructed line that I’ve set up for myself as to my boundaries. I don’t believe that, if someone can watch certain sexual assault, rape or torture scenes which I can’t, that we should immediately lock them up. If anything, it is often the people with the most extreme tastes who are the biggest puppy dogs, and the people who are super into wholesome entertainment who turn out to be Annie Wilkes.

But these topics do often call for debate, or at least a questioning of one’s own boundaries. This is the main takeaway that I had when watching 2010’s I Saw The Devil (악마를 보았다), a brutal revenge thriller/horror from director Kim Jee-woon (A Tale Of Two Sisters) and actors Choi Min-shik (the main one off of Oldboy) and Lee Byung-hun (the Front Man off of Squid Game). This film tells the story of Lee’s character Soo-hyun as he commits to a cycle of hunting down, torturing and releasing the evil serial killer (Choi) who murdered his wife. Laughs aplenty obviously. While not new at all in the Korean cinema cannon in terms of revenge or murder, this film seems to use the level of its violence as its unique signature, leading to an ultimately hollow viewing experience with a sourer taste in the mouth than I would have liked.

Now, if you’ve watched this movie and loved it- as a lot of Korean cinema fans do- please calm down, because I do realise the point of this movie. Because honestly, it’s not exactly subtly put. Just as Parasite’s title keeps us questioning as to who or what the actual parasite of the film is, so to does Devil ask us who that figure might be. Except, from the marketing material we see posters of these two characters facing each other at eye level, in profile. In the film, they are just about the only characters who are fleshed out to any real degree (and debatably not even both of them get that honour). If the question the title asks is ‘who is the devil in this film?’, then the answer is quite obviously: ‘probably one of those two guys I reckon’.

We are being directed to the idea that Soo-hyun’s determination to achieve vengeance for his wife may make him morally as murky as Choi’s Kyung-chul. This is not an uninteresting idea, but it’s also not an original one. It’s essentially the point of the entire revenge genre, stretching right back to Shakespeare and before. If you do bad thing to try balance out other bad thing, maybe you bad too. It’s not revolutionary in that aspect. That’s not to say that this in itself is a detriment at all: as I said, some pretty big hitters have had a go at this same idea, because it’s a universally compelling one. Just as I refuse to shit on Squid Game for using the trope of a childlike game played to the death, I’m not criticising Devil for being about revenge. Hell, Choi Min-shik himself is the key actor in Park Chan-wook’s monumental Revenge trilogy, which excellently treads much of the same path.

But Devil contains several elements that stop it from coming close to these dizzying heights, and I feel that the use of violence and violent imagery is one of them. As I mentioned up top, a lot of it is personal. I find lingering on gore, and acts of sadism to be particularly hard to watch, and there are a lot of them here. You could, fairly, argue that this is to emphasise the absolute horror of Choi’s serial killer and the relentlessness of Soo-hyun in pursuing him, and whoo boy does that point get (often literally) hammered home. We see Soo-hyun slitting Choi’s Achilles tendon, ripping open another serial killer’s jaw, and snapping some arms. We also see Kyung-chul beheading victims and laying out their dismembered body parts.

This is deeply unpleasant, obviously, and thus I was constantly questioning why I needed to see it. Depravity can be conveyed without being this visual: in another Choi Min-shik-as-nasty-ass-murderer-vehicle Lady Vengeance, we are made fully aware that his character is a sadistic child killer without having to see this on screen. We didn’t need to see bodies mutilated and bloody to know that something unspeakable has happened: in fact, that film chose specifically to portray this through the reactions of the victims’ families to these acts. This comparison, along with a couple of others, left me wondering if the point of seeing all of this on-screen wasn’t a little worryingly superficial.

This violence particularly bothered me because it often presented—again, as I mentioned at the start—as sexual violence. There is a scene early on in the film where Kyung-chul is only stopped from raping a minor by Soo-hyun’s sudden presence, and we are shown shots of her body and underwear before this happens. In a later scene, he has begun orally raping a nurse before Soo-hyun’s avenging angel finally makes an appearance (Jesus could you not have run a little bit faster?). I know I know, shying away from the brutality softens the blow of how disgusting this all is, but I have to counter that by simply noting that it’s just distressing to have to sit through this in a fictional narrative. Particularly as the female characters in this movie are absolutely paper-thin stereotypes.

Mostly murder victims, with the occasional concerned mother or stroppy daughter in about thirty seconds of a scene, the women here are plot points to move along a narrative. Soo-hyun’s wife, Joo-yun (I had to look up her and all other female characters’ names, forgettable as they were) is in only one scene before suffering a brutal death, as is another female victim at a bus stop. The nurse in the scene mentioned above is only there for one scene, presumably left to handle the horrible trauma of what happened to her on her own watch (actually, Soo-hyun even intensifies her pain by not allowing her to leave until after he’s tortured Kyung-chul a bit, for some fucking reason). In the section of the film set in a house that Kyung-chul’s murderer pal has commandeered from a victim locked in the basement, we see said woman attempting escape, and hear neither hide nor hair from her again.

I can understand that the narrative is focussed on the two male characters, and is dealing with revenge rather than trauma, which can partly explain the situations I have just complained about. The film even shows an awareness of this in a scene where Joo-yun’s sister Se-yun, aware of what Soo-hyun is doing, specifically asks him to stop, calling the pursuit “meaningless” and reminding him that it won’t bring his wife back. She is presented as a voice of reason, and it is frustrating as an audience member to watch him disregard her pleas. However, when, in the climax of the film, Kyung-chul finds and kills Se-yun (he beats her father, who, while older and the recipient of a lot of dumbbell hits to the eye, survives), we literally see a second or two of footage of the police finding her corpse. The narrative then moves the focus back on to the cat and mouse game, Se-yun clearly just a more distinct voice in an ultimately disposable chorus of women unfortunate enough to live in this universe.

There are many people who will roll their eyes at this critique, saying that it is an unfair reading of a genre picture, that the entire point is that these men are flawed because they don’t care about women, and god does everything have to be a ‘right on sister’ portrayal of women for you to be happy? Well, honestly mate that would be nice, but I am a realist. Live in a society and all that. Whilst it would be like, totally cute to see fewer films where women are raped and chopped up, that isn’t to say that serial murders of women can never make a compelling storyline.

In Bong Joon-ho’s masterful Memories of Murder, I would argue that his character realisation and cinematographic choices specifically underline how misogyny across minds and institutions leads to femicide, and how tragic this is. This too is a film where women are horribly murdered by a man, but their objectification is highlighted and explored. In I Saw The Devil, it is ignored. Soo-hyun doesn’t do anything to safeguard the female victims of this film after he has saved them from Kyung-chul, because after he’s done that, they don’t matter to him. To him or the film.

This opinion made me massively surprised to learn that the director of this film is the same guy who made A Tale Of Two Sisters, a terrifying fairy tale that centred and explored feminine experiences so brilliantly. How can the same mind have gotten to this point? Two Sisters, while not utterly perfect, draws the relationships between sisters, mothers and stepmothers evocatively and emotively, and manages to show the trauma of a whole family with a sense of balance. It too occasionally turns to the bloody, but never to the exploitative. Kim Jee-woon clearly understands how to show the impact of violence and horror, so it is all the more disappointing that he forgets it in this later film.

I will, however, give director Kim Jee-woon the credit for continuing his impressive cinematography into Devil, as it was the film’s strongest element for me. The opening shot, a POV from a driver’s seat, is seamlessly executed, and there are endless beautifully framed shots to remind us to think about the perspective we’re looking from. The standout moment for me was the pan-out to reveal Soo-hyun’s modern, minimalist apartment in full, at night, against a backdrop of skyscrapers, slowly fading into the scene around it. In moments like this I was reminded that skilful people are at work here.

And of course, if Choi Min-shik is involved, there’s going to be a good performance. He is horribly convincing as the depraved rapist murderer that he is playing. However, I didn’t really feel the same from anyone else, including Lee Byung-hun, as I just felt that the characters ultimately were not drawn very well. Even with Choi, despite his great work, I was left with questions as to why this man was like this, and not having them answered felt unsatisfying. Again, I can almost hear the retort of ‘that’s the point, we don’t know why, we can’t, it isn’t about that’ and yes, I see that. But for me, it’s not compelling enough.

Soo-hyun’s character also does not seem to exist outside of his vengeful mode. We have one brief scene in the beginning to establish him as a loving husband, on the phone to his wife, but that hardly shows us the depths of his soul. We watch a man throughout the majority of this movie who is motivated solidly by gruesome revenge. We have no evidence that he has propensity for this in his personality or past, no idea of what has made him who he is, nothing. Personally, I feel like a character is well-drawn when I can understand them outside the context of the narrative I see them in: what would Soo-hyun the man be like if his wife had not died? Who would that person have been? I have no idea, because nothing in the film told me this. Whence more I shall hold my hands up and say yes, this is a personal preference, and of course there is space for genre cinema to lean more on character archetypes than fleshed-out people. But it left me cold as a viewer.

Ultimately, in a film that is as happy to delve into brutality as I Saw The Devil is, I had hoped for a more holistic exploration of the ideas at play. By neglecting character development, and creating next to no space at all for the women in this film to have any autonomy or significance outside of being pawns in the main characters’ game of chess, everything rang hollow for me. I’m happy, and more than a little smug, to say that my favourite film critic Mark Kermode seems to agree with me, of course putting it better than I did, and more speedily too.

Interestingly, the majority of the comments are from listeners complaining that Mark totally missed the, err, mark (hah) and was a just a little sissy about some good old nastiness. Which is ironic considering this critic is famous for loving horrors such as The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I too do not mind a nice bit of blood, nor do I have any inherent problem with serial killer dramas or revenge stories. But I Saw The Devil is sadly too fascinated by seeing the work that this devil can do, rather than asking him anything impactful about why he is doing it.