When Obsessed With Film reported with some excitement that
Ji-Woon Kim was returning to feature film-making with
I Saw the Devil last year, it could not have been expected that the film would still be unreleased in the UK. The controversial, bloody revenge thriller was released in Korea last August and was met with broad critical approval. The film, featuring Oldboy star
Choi-min Sik, has finally received an official UK release date of April 29th and an official English subtitled trailer to go along with it: I Saw the Devil sees a secret agent pursue a seemingly arbitrarily brutal serial killer after his fiancé is murdered. The notorious depictions of violence are unapologetic and unremitting- so much so that distribution both domestically and abroad has been problematic for Kim and his production company- with several clashes with international censors over content. Choi Min Sik makes only his second appearance in a Korean feature in over five years- the last of the similairly themed Vengeance trilogy- due to self-imposed exile at changes to the South Korean quota system, the relaxation of which he believed detrimental to Korean cinema. Siks militancy is well known in the far-east and he was brazenly scornful of the methods employed by Hollywood studios to pressure Korean producers into sanctioning English language remakes. Such principled acts should bode well for those who fear something of an Oldboy-lite exercise in I Saw the Devil and, if the trailer is anyting to go by, it has that glorious stylish sheen by which Korean cinema can be so readily identified.
