official description
Anyone who caught Kim Ji-woon’s’s schizophrenic “kimchi Western” The Good, the Bad, the Weird at the Festival in 2008 is in for a wicked surprise with his latest genre mash-up, which plays like a hybrid of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Better still, I Saw the Devil pairs two of South Korea’s top performers – Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik and The Good, the Bad, the Weird’s Lee Byung-Hyun – as two ferocious men whose lives intersect by way of a horrific murder.
Kyung-chul (Min-sik) is a maniacal serial killer who drives a yellow school bus and preys on young women. He captures and kills his victims, but their deaths are not the end of his madness. While the police have been aware of his actions for some time, they have never been able to put a name or face to his crimes.
When the corpse of a retired police chief’s pregnant daughter surfaces, things change gears and the hunter quickly becomes the hunted. Yet it is not the girl’s father who swears vengeance, but rather her secret agent fiancé, Joo-yeon (Byung-Hyun), who decides to track down the perpetrator himself. Anyone with even the remotest information on the killer’s whereabouts is in for a bloody beating. But when his mission starts to come together, Joo-yeon morphs into quite a disturbing monster himself.
With an outstanding filmography that also includes A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life, Ji-woon has already established himself as an auteur with a precise knack for capturing powerful and innovative images that complement his dense narratives and intriguing characters. I Saw the Devil is sure to be one of the most grotesque and gorgeous genre films you will see this year.
Giovanna Fulvi
Principal Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik
Producer: Kim Hyun-woo
Executive Producer: Greg Moon, Jeong Hun-you
Cinematographer: Lee Mogae
Editor: Nam Na-young
Sound: Choi Tae-young
Music: Mowg
Production Designer: Cho Hwa-sung
International Sales Agent: Finecut
Production Company: Peppermint & Company, Ltd.
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