I Saw the Devil (2010)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com July 21, 2023

Spoiler-free Judgment Zone

The movie reaches a sort of resolution much sooner than we expected. And then it keeps going much further than that. It’s very well made, gory, violent, surprising, and very entertaining.

Spoilery Synopsis

We start with someone driving through the snowy countryside as credits roll. A woman phones her boyfriend and says that she visited the orphanage today; children are so cute. Someone walks up to her car in the snow. She’s stopped for a flat tire, and the man offers to take a look. Her boyfriend is working some kind of security job, and it’s her birthday, but they both seem nice about it. She tells the man outside that she’ll just wait for the tow truck; he goes back to his truck but doesn’t leave. He then breaks in through the window and beats her to death with a hammer. He drags her body off through the bloody snow as credits continue to roll.

She wakes up later, naked and chained to a pole in a barn. He has a wide selection of knives and comments on how soft her skin is. She begs him not to kill her because she’s pregnant. He doesn’t care; soon she’s a pile of dismembered parts. He drops her ring and leaves it behind after his cleanup.

A little boy finds a shopping bag with an ear in it, and there’s soon a massive search. Squad Chief Jang arrives, upset; his daughter is the one who’s gone missing. Soo-Hyeon also arrives; he’s the boyfriend we saw earlier. The girl’s head is found, and things get crazy,

The next day, Chief Jang and Soo-Hyeon meet to talk. Jang was a police chief for 30 years before retiring. Joo-Yeon has a big funeral, and Soo-hyeon swears, “I will make him pay for your pain.” He takes a few weeks off work. Soo-Hyeon is some kind of secret agent, and he decides to take care of this himself.

Soo-Hyeon narrows things down to four suspects. Soo-Hyeon soon tracks down and mutilates one until he confesses to the police about kidnapping and killing a girl several months ago– but not Joo-Yeon. He does something similar to the second suspect as well.

We cut to another woman, alone at a bus stop. The same work truck pulls up next to her, and the killer from before, Jang Kyung-Chol, offers her a ride. He whacks her with an old pipe. This time, he uses a guillotine to behead her in his barn.

Soo-Hyeon talks to Kyung-Chol’s parents, and they think their son is a deadbeat who abandoned them and his own son. He does get an address for the man. Soo-Hyeon breaks into the man’s house and finds purses, shoes, and bras – it looks like he keeps souvenirs. Then the agent finds the “barn” with a bloody floor and various torture implements. He also finds his fiancé’s engagement ring.

We see that Kyung-chol really is a school bus driver who now has a tracking device on his bus. The police come looking for him, but he’s out on the road. Kyung-chol takes a girl from the bus to a greenhouse and does his thing with her. Soo-Hyeon, using the tracker, approaches from outside.

Kyung-chol senses that there’s someone there, and the two men face each other. They have a brutal knife fight in the greenhouse, which ends with Kyung-chol being beaten unconscious pretty badly. Soo-Hyeon feeds the killer a GPS tracker capsule that he took from work– and leaves him.

Kyung-chol wakes up some time later and finds an envelope full of money. Why? He flags down a cab and shares the ride with two passengers, one of whom already has a knife out to rob the cabbie. The following scene between the three men is… epic.

Kyung-Chol goes to the doctor to get patched up, and he bullies the doctor and nurse. He’s about to rape the nurse when Soo-Hyeon comes in and beats him up again before slicing his Achilles tendon. He’s not walking away from that! Soo-Hyeon has the nurse bandage up Kyung-chol and releases him again. We soon see that not only can Soo-Hyeon track the killer, but he can hear everything that’s going on around him.

Squad Chief Jang calls Soo-Hyeon and says the police think he’s the one pursuing and tormenting Kyung-chol. Jang knows what’s really up and says maybe it’s time to stop. The old man’s other daughter, Se-Jung wants to know what Soo-Hyeon is up to. She wants him to stop as well. “Whatever you do to punish him won’t help anything. Revenge is for movies.”

Kyung-chol gets picked up by a farmer who eats human flesh himself. He tells them who he is, and they’re OK with that – they’ve worked together. They talk about the “hunter” who is playing with Kyung-chol. The farmer’s out of fresh meat, so he opens up the cell and pulls out a chained-up woman. She’s the actual owner of the farm, and he just finished eating her sister. Soo-Hyeon interrupts the proceedings until Kyung-chol shows up with a shotgun. Things go badly for the cannibals. Soo-Hyeon drives off with the unconscious killer in the car.

The next day, the police are on the scene, and they ask the old chief about Soo-Hyeon. They know who’d been doing the revenge crimes and want the old man to get him to stop.

Soo-Hyeon’s work friend tells him he should give up the killer, but Soo-Hyeon says he’s a long way from finished. He asks how the tracker bug is working, and we know that it’s inside Kyung-Chol, who eventually wakes up, released in an isolated tunnel somewhere. Kyung-Chol now realizes that Soo-Hyeon can hear and follow him and starts taunting him over the radio. Maybe the torment can go both ways.

Kyung-chol takes a bunch of laxatives and gets the tracker out. He force-feeds it to a random man that he knocks out. Now, Soo-Hyeon has no idea where the killer is but soon comes to the conclusion that he’ll go after Chief Jang and Se-Jung.

Kyung-chol calls the police and says he’ll turn himself in later today, but he has something to do first. Chief Jang answers the door, and guess who’s there? Kyung-chol beats up old Jang pretty severely, and then Se-Jung comes home; he kills her too.

Kyung-chol calls and sets up a meeting, saying he’s won. He gets out of the car, covered in blood, and there are about a hundred cops watching. He raises his arms to surrender to the cops, but Soo-Hyeon swoops in and grabs him first.

Soo-Hyeon drives to Kyung-Chol’s original house, where the baddie killed Soo-Hyeon’s fiance. Kyung-chol begs for him to just hurry up and kill him, but Soo-Hyeon takes his time. “I’ll kill you at your most painful moment.” Kyung-chol isn’t going to give him the satisfaction of crying or saying he’s afraid. Soo-Hyeon then leaves him tied up, in the guillotine, with the blade connected to the door. Sooner or later, someone’s going to open that door. Until then, Kyung-Chol’s going to have to wait.

Then, Kyung-Chol’s family arrives; Soo-Hyeon called them. Much screaming ensues…

Commentary

I wonder if Soo-Hyeon plans to go back to work on Monday?

It’s got torture, gore, excessive murders, and a lot of suspense. It’s all beautifully filmed, even at night, and there’s never any doubt as to what’s going on or who is who. The fight scenes are really well done, and a couple of them are quite unique. Some of it’s a little too over-the-top to be realistic, but it’s definitely entertaining and brutal.

It may be the most over-the-top, elaborate revenge film of all time. We liked it!