10 Movies Where The Good Guy & Bad Guy BOTH Lose
9. I Saw The Devil
Kim Jee-woon's stunningly disturbing thriller I Saw the Devil follows Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), an NIS agent who embarks on a tireless quest for vengeance after his fiancée is murdered by serial killer Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik).
The story indeed ends with Soo-hyun exacting nasty revenge on Kyung-chul, placing him in a guillotine which is triggered when his son and elderly parents pay him a visit, decapitating him in front of them.
A fitting end for a serial killer? Probably, though the final scene, where a still-traumatised Soo-hyun breaks down in the street, makes it clear that he's won nothing and gained no closure from killing him.
He's instead gone to depraved depths he didn't know possible, needlessly traumatising Kyung-chul's family and entirely losing himself in the process, while left with the empty realisation that murdering Kyung-chul brought him no peace whatsoever.
If thrillers about the futility of revenge are a dime a dozen, few have conveyed that message as powerfully as I Saw the Devil, bringing both its psychotic antagonist and anguished protagonist to one of cinema's grimmest ever stalemates.