I Saw the Devil (2010)
This is one BLOODY-Ferocious revenge thriller! After finding out his girlfriend has been brutally murdered by a sadistic killer, NSI agent Soo-Hyun takes the matters into his own hand and soon enough able to tracks down the psychopath culprit Kyung-chul who mercilessly likes to kill his young female victims with a dose of sexual assault. Soo-Hyun also takes an oath for his dead gf to give her killer ‘10000 times more pain’ and eventually he tries that through his own macabre catch-and-release game. He finds Kyung-chul & beats him up pretty badly, but instead of killing him, he leaves him alive. He wants to stalk his prey, and exact his revenge slowly and increasingly more painfully. Soo-Hyun takes the vengeance into a new level of gruesomeness where the line between ‘good & evil’ or ‘crime & punishment’ becomes blurred…where both of them explores & shows their darker & meaner side to each other and finally confronts the Devil on earth within them.
This kind of hard-boiled revenge thriller today we can only find in Korea. But in compare to Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy or Korea's rising genre of Serial killer films (like
Memories of Murder, Mother & The Chaser) ISTD doesn’t come with the same level of ‘Sympathy’ dilemma or emotional content that leaves you with a devastating or mind blowing experience. But it’s a pure and nearly over the top gore & action pack revenge thriller that surely has the capacity to satisfy its original audience. One sequence involving a brutal double murder in a running cab where the camera swoops around the scene in a circle is simply magnificent to watch. So don’t take it as just another grotesque revenge thriller…there’s plenty of eye catching moments you’ll find in Kim Ji-woon’s (the director of
The Quiet Family, A Tale of 2 Sisters, A Bittersweet Life and The Good, the Bad, the Weird) I SAW THE DEVIL.
>>: A-
Our Town (2007)
The film is set in a small, unnamed Korean town and the story surrounds here this time with two killers…an original & a copycat. Since the identities of the killers are never in any doubt, the mystery comes in form of the motives behind and the messages intended by the murders and the link between the three men (the killer, copycat & the detective). And as the story progress in a three way game of cat and mouse, with some twists & turns it comes to question who the original killer here is actually? Though it’s not up to the level of some recent Korean masterpiece Serial Killer flicks and the flashbacks may turn out to be bit confusing for some viewers but I still liked it pretty much.
>>: B+