3. I Saw The Devil (2010)
A young woman called Joo-yun gets a flat tire in some very snowy weather. A man in a bus - Kyung-chul - on the pretense of being a good Samaritan, tells her he will help her but instead murders her and strews her body parts all over the place. When Joo-yun's body is pieced together, her fiance Soo-hyun who is a secret service agent vows to track her killer and make him pay. He is given a list of four potential suspects. After rifling through Kyung-chul's possessions he finds Joo-yun's ring. He plants a tracking device on Kyung-chul's bus, and begins attacking Kyung-chul every time he kills, rapes or maims people. A befuddled Kyung-chul joes to his friend Tae-joo's home for advice. Tae-joo is a cannibalistic murderer with bodies galore in his freezer. He tells Kyung-chul that his mystery assailant must be a relative of the young woman. Soo-hyun arrives at the house and beats the two killers to a pulp. A semi conscious Kyung-chul realises he is bugged and who the perpetrator is. When he is recovered, he leads Soo-hyun on a merry dance and then kills Soo-hyun's father and sister. A distraught but vengeful Soo-hyun rigs up a device that will decapitate Kyung-chul when his family call. We see Soo-hyun crying in the streets. A film which is full of transgression, I Saw The Devil makes for an extremely graphic and disturbing view. It is a hard boiled revenge thriller which is extremely violent - seriously violent - and not a masked man chasing after a bikini clad girl violent. The acting in the film is very good and hits the nail on the head. Min sik Choi gives a blisteringly nasty turn as Kyung-chul and he really steals the show in the film, turning a revenge thriller into a showdown of good against almost supernatural evil bad. My only problem with the film is that at 140 minutes, it is quite a hefty piece of cinema to digest. The director should have honed his editing skills but the film is still a masterpiece of transgressive cinema and a believable portrait of a serial killer.