by Allan Fish
(South Korea 2010 141m) not on DVD
Aka. Akmareul boatda
Spare my life
p Kim Hyun-woo d Kim Ji-woon w Park Hoon-jung ph Lee Mogae ed Nam Na-young m Mowg art Cho Hwa-sung
Lee Byung-hoon (Kim Soo-hyeon), Choi Min-sik (Jang Gyeong-chul), Jeon Gook-hwan (Chief Jang), Jeon Ho-jin (Chief Oh), Oh San-ha (Joo-yeon), Kim Soon-yeo (Se-yeon),
His previous film had been The Good, the Bad & the Weird, a manically enjoyable roller-coaster of a movie which has already found a place in this work. No-one could call it serious cinema, but God was it fun, fun enough to make one look forward to his next work with baited breath and a lump in the chest. It’s a feeling, or rather a description of the said feeling, that I would come to regret using.
Kim Soo-hyeon is a young cop on the homicide squad who rings to tell his fiancée he can’t meet her for her birthday as work has got in the way. Their love is all too clear, and as it happens her car has broke down so she was going to struggle to get there anyway. A passing driver, with a school minibus, has stopped to help her, but as it turns out, help is the last thing he wants to offer. He smashes up her car, beats her brutally with a hammer and drags her away to rape, torture and kill her at a remote location. When her decapitated head is found in a somewhat circus-like forensic hunt, Kim Soo-hyeon swears revenge on behalf of his fiancée and her father, who it transpires is one of his chiefs. Armed with a GPS tracking capsule and profiles of the four likely suspects, he takes a two week sabbatical from work to keep his promise to make the killer suffer 10,000 times more than his beloved.
Vengeance is certainly no new motive in crime dramas, and indeed the title of a certain Imamura film comes to mind as perhaps a better title. What Ji-woon does, quite expertly, is to walk a tightrope between the moral arguments against vengeance and the sense of satisfaction the thought of it gives the afflicted. In the course of his vengeance seeking, he turns his back on the law, allows several other innocent people to be killed or abused, and acts in a truly reprehensible manner. “You can’t become a monster to fight a monster” he is told, but hears nothing. While his friends and colleagues and her family grieve, he is not interested in a grief that can give no release. His tracking, hunting, stalking of his prey while he himself searches out his own prey is, in every sense of the word, remorseless, like giving not his blood but his soul with every passing day.
The film is thus pitched at what could easily become an overwrought emotional level, but which in actual fact plays like the last act of Se7en for a whole movie, a sense of absolute moral, emotional and physical devastation. And if the link to Fincher’s movie might seem tenuous, the feeling one is left with at the end is equally soul-destroying. Vengeance turned counter-vengeance, turned counter-counter vengeance, turned…void. There are even flashes, memento moris, of the work of David Lynch, from the shots at the end of the endless road recalling Lost Highway to the discovery of an ear (or part of one) in a plastic bag (see Blue Velvet), leading to further morbid discoveries.
Visually it’s composed in deliberately muted, neutral shades, everything dark even in daytime, many of the interiors shot in dingy locales with no windows, perfect sound-proof hideaways for the depraved. And at the centre are two astonishingly good central performances. Byung-hoon, the bad guy in black in Weird, is a perfect silent hunter, again in all black, but driven by an altogether darker agenda, playing and played with by his quarry. Perfectly matching him is Min-sik, in his best role since his memorable lead in Chan-wook’s Oldboy, a sicko to rival any. It’s not an easy film to watch, indeed had not A Serbian Film totally blown all revenge dramas out of the water in extremity the self same year, it would have received more heat than it did, but it’s two exceptional works in a row for the director and further evidence that, with Ki-duk, Chan-wook and Chang-dong all capable of masterpieces of their own, Korean cinema has never been healthier.
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Wow, so Allan likes it too!
Following psychological horror, existential mob drama, & kimichi-western, Kim takes on serial killer/revenge flick in mold of Heat/FaceOff/The Dark Knight! Like all his previous films, it’s the surface that he’s most interested in. He scratches it, even if barely, for the ridges (Futility of revenge, disparity of other forms of violence in face of rape, and so on.) to be made felt. But it’s the immediacy of the faceoff, & carnal violence that one finds gripping. It feels weak when it explores adultery that borders on statutory rape. But it just so seems like Kim doesn’t want our ‘consent’. He takes the genre to unknown territory (breaks the convention like all his previous films without seeming gimmicky), and for the first time (at least to me), unfolds with a seamless narrative (the plot-points seem less wrinkled). The most fascinating aspect of Kim is mood control (take all the bouts of silence between the explosive action set-pieces of TGTB&TW), the opening sequence is one of the best all year.
A much more worthwhile experience than films nominated for Oscar this year. And contains my fav. performances of 2010. Choi min-sik gives another legendary turn to kick off this decade. As Oldboy’s Dae-su kicked off the early part of 2000’s with one of the rawest performances of all time, Kyung-Chul in flesh and blood seems to be a concoction of Stuntman Mike & Max Cady with Ledger thrown in for bouts of irreverence & vanity! But it all seems organic like Min-Sik could only be! Korean Gary Oldman in his chameleon-like metamorphosis. Mr.Lee lives up to the ‘Korean Delon’ tag bestowed on him post-Bittersweet Life.
Wonderful comment here Duallist and very much appreciated here at WitD. While I just recently watched a very great Korean film in the theatres last week (“Poetry”) I’m afraid this one has eluded me, not that I was actively seeking it out. I do look forward to it.
I look forward to watching POETRY. I’m expecting maturity & an overall progression in Chang-dong’s work. I liked SECRET SUNSHINE with some reservations.
Interesting reading about the similarities to a few of David Lynch’s films. I’d love a copy.
Didn’t care all that much for the Good, the bad and the weird but your review certainly interests me in this current film.
I knew this was going to happen eventually. I don’t know why I predicted that Allan would love this film in some way. His love for “The Good, the Bad and the Weird” kinda warned me about this, but still it’s a great surprise to see this magnificent essay on one of the best movies of the 2010.
I think that korean cinema is on its peak, and the masterpieces from directors like Park, Bong and this just make me more excited on its future than anything else.
They still try to have an industry with certain formulaic genre hollywood-like output, like the one I recently saw “The Man from Nowhere”, but still is better than the average film made in USA.
Anyway, this movie I loved and I agree on the acting, it’s one of the year’s greatest.
Amazing essay Allan! This is the masterpiece of this director.
I’ve seen 4 reviews for this movie now, and all four called it a masterpiece. I am very excited now.
Though I do wonder–people said Park Chan-Wook’s “Oldboy” was a masterpiece, too, but I kind of ended up hating it. The violence and suffering was just too random and outrageous and pointless in the end. On the other hand, I thought both Bong Joon-Ho’s “Mother” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird” were fantastic. Would you say this is more like Oldboy or the latter two?
Of course I Saw the Devil is the same director as The Good, the Bad and the Weird, but VERY different films. The only link is that both reference western (that’s geographical not genre) classics. In the case of Devil,, there are references to Blue Velvet, Se7en, even The Dark Knight in the villain’s faintly Jokeresque performance. Many will baulk at the illogicality of the cop’s motivation and actions, but that it exactly the point, grief and vengeance are not logical.
If one paraphrases Vincent Schiavelli in BTVS, “vengeance is a living thing. It passes through the generations. It commands. It kills…”