Displaying items by tag: Lee Byunghun

I SAW THE DEVIL

Korea, 2010, 144 minutes, Colour.

Lee Byung hun, Choi Min-sik.

Directed by Kim Jee-woon.

This is a very confronting drama, highly admired in Korea , a challenge to world audiences.

Focus is on a serial killer, an ordinary enough citizen, driving a school bus. However, he has had a violent history and violent friends. He is initially seen attempting to help a stranded woman in her car, brutalising her, ignoring the plea that she was pregnant, bashing her, dissecting her body, a child learning a container with an ear, then a huge squad searching the grounds and finding her head.

And, this is only the beginning of a great number of grim and gruesome confrontations by the killer, with a woman at the bus stop offering her a lift, with a student in the school bus, and various women associated with him and the family of the first deceased woman.

Commentators have been very strong on differentiating this kind of presentation of “obscene” behaviour, highlighting that it is not pornographic, though some may argue that there is a pornography of brutal violence. They say it is different from the American horror films which simply pile on the gruesome sequences for effect rather than an exploration of character.

This film offers some exploration of character, especially the husband of the first deceased woman, her phoning him when she is stranded with a flat tire in the countryside in the snow, his grief at the finding of her body, his attendance at the funeral, his discussions with his father-in-law who had been a police chief. And the police squad is sympathetic towards the bereaved man, giving him leave, one colleague giving him an earpiece will and a device which could be used to track the killer.

The film then become something of a Death Wish, with a vengeance – but more than a vengeance, a ruthless and dramatic pursuit of criminals, the plan not to kill immediately but to torture and torment, pursue. And this is what the bereaved man does. But, at first, he targets two suspected abusers, one watching pornography who is then violently attacked, the other attacked in the street and pursuit.

However, the main part of this very long film is the continual pursuit of the serial killer, catching him, torturing him, fighting, letting go, continually tracking him down, tracking his meeting with a violent friend and torturing him also, the police in pursuit and concerned about the death wish violence and revenge.

Finally, the father-in-law is attacked violently, the police setting up a trap, the killer allegedly saying he would surrender but the bereaved man catching him, a final confrontation, tying him up, a brutal link with his mouth to the door – and final decapitation.

The final sequence is the bereaved man alone, walking down the street, beginning to weep.

The film takes its place in the violence instability in sensibilities of Korean filmmaking in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, a capacity for looking at brutality more than in many other film industries at the time. For discussion, the distinction has to be made when asking the questions “what” is being presented and, so much more importantly, “how” it is being presented.

Star is the popular actor over 25 years, Lee Byung-hun, in Joint Security Area in 2000, a star of the popular television series Squid Game, and the award-winning No Other Choice.