🎃 31 Days of Halloween – Day 28 🎃
★★★½
Rewatched 28 Oct 2025
Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010) stars Lee Byung-hun as a secret agent whose pregnant fiancée is brutally murdered by a sadistic serial killer. The killer, played by Choi Min-sik, is best known to international audiences as the tormented protagonist of Oldboy (2003). The casting is deliberate. In Oldboy, Choi was the victim of an elaborate revenge plot; here, he’s on the receiving end of one yet again. The two roles form a mirror, both centered on cycles of vengeance and absurd cruelty.
In Oldboy, Choi’s character is humiliated so continuously and grotesquely that the film teeters between tragedy and farce. It’s almost like watching Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force being psychologically and physically punished in increasingly absurd ways. I Saw the Devil amplifies that dynamic until it becomes its entire premise. The killer, Jang Kyung-chul, is Carl. He’s a grotesque, sleazy and pathetic, yet somehow indestructible. The avenging agent, Kim Soo-hyun, is Bugs Bunny with a badge. He’s clever, sadistic, and endlessly inventive in tormenting his prey. The movie even adopts a kind of Looney Tunes rhythm: Kyung-chul gets captured, beaten, humiliated, and released, only for the cycle to repeat in escalating, cartoonishly violent scenarios.
This cat-and-mouse structure pushes the film toward dark comedy, though one buried beneath buckets of blood. Released amid the post-Saw and Hostel “torture porn” wave, I Saw the Devil takes that genre’s fixation on bodily punishment and stretches it to the point of parody. The violence is so extreme and prolonged that it becomes absurd. For the first ninety minutes, this tonal tightrope walk works. It’s a comedy disguised as a horror film disguised as a crime thriller.
But around the two-hour mark, the film overstays its welcome. There’s a moment when Kyung-chul turns himself in, providing a perfect natural endpoint that would’ve reinforced the movie’s intended moral that revenge solves nothing. Instead, Kim Jee-woon pushes on for another half hour of elaborate cruelty, including a Saw-like finale involving the killer’s innocent family. The theme is muddied, and the Looney Tunes dynamic has grown tiresome after well over two hours.
Still, I Saw the Devil is worth seeing and maybe even worth rewatching. It’s consistently engaging and entertaining for most of its runtime, even if ultimately, the devil isn’t just in the details, but in the editing room that refused to cut them.