I Saw the Devil is a brilliant Korean crime/drama movie that mixes in horror elements to up the intensity to fantastic heights. The cop/criminal relationship gets a new twist here which makes this story one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

A serial killer, Kyung-chul, is on the loose and when he attacks police officer Kim Soo-hyeon’s pregnant fiance, the hunt for this man becomes personal.  While the typical plot line for this type of movie means we watch the cop chase the killer for the entire movie, in I Saw the Devil, the killer is found in the beginning. Kim is on an obsessive mission, going rogue and uses his own channels to quickly find Kyung . He stops him in a green house as he is preparing his next kill. Kim saves the woman and beats the stuffing out of Kyung, then surprisingly let’s him go. Kim wants to the predator, to draw out Kyung’s punishment. That proves to be a very bad idea.

Flipping the script on this genre with such a fresh idea makes for one hell of a ride. Kyung is an absolute psychopath and each encounter he has with Kim gets more and more brutal. The cat and mouse chase these two have is just an escalation in chaos. By putting Kying on his back foot, Kim ends up making the monster worse. This movie is not for those with constitutions, there is a ton of blood and violence. As gruesome as it can be,  ISTD is just as beautiful. Kim Jee-woon is a fantastic director. The framing, the lighting and the grimy-ness of this cinematic world is expertly crafted.

I keep wanting to compare this to Silence of the Lambs in terms of tone. Mad men sweeping others into their darkness, leaving bodies in their wake. Such a great movie, I highly recommend it (warning: subtitles).