“I Saw the Devil” (2010)
Comparable to “A Bittersweet Life,” in tone and artistic execution (though it’s a spin on the serial killer movie rather than the gangster genre), “I Saw the Devil,” in scope and scale and sheer beauty, is an absolute, balls-to-the-walls, blood-drenched masterpiece. The tale of Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), a school bus driver who likes to hack up women in his spare time, and the secret agent (Lee Byung-hun) who he crosses when he murders the agent’s pregnant wife, it plays out as a relentless cat-and-mouse game, with the agent picking up the killer, fucking with him, and then letting him go free. Of course, every time the bad guy gets let loose again, he kills a bunch of people (and one of the movie’s best jokes is that one out of every three characters seems to be an active serial killer), which doesn’t exactly make the agent a completely “good” character either. When we got the screening invite to “I Saw the Devil” a couple of years ago, there was a warning about the movie’s explicit violence, which we had never seen before (or since). And yes, “I Saw the Devil” is drenched in the sticky red stuff, but it never takes away from the emotional journey you go on with the conflicted agent and the set pieces, including one where our bad guy shacks up with a cannibal, are truly virtuoso. This is Kim unleashed – definitely not for the faint of heart, but utterly rewarding for those who are willing to go on the soot-black journey. [A-]
“Heavenly Creature” from “Doomsday Book” (2012)
For some reason, “Doomsday Book,” an uncanny South Korean science fiction anthology that made the domestic film festival rounds over the last year (it last screened, to an appropriately uproarious audience response at Austin’s Fantastic Fest), never gained much attention outside the circuit despite being pretty awesome. Two of the segments were helmed by Yim Pil-sung, who previously directly the agreeably oddball fable “Hansel & Gretel,” and while Yim’s sections (“Brave New World” and “Happy Birthday“) are pretty fun and handsomely shot, the section that really leaves an impression is Kim Jee-woon’s “Heavenly Creature.” The tale of a service robot, stationed at a monastery for Buddhist monks, who believes that it has reached spiritual transcendence much to the chagrin of the robot company (and a very confused repairman), it is witty and hilarious, thought-provoking and totally engaging. What makes this even more impressive is that, aside from the robot (which looks uncomfortably similar to the already derivative droids from “I, Robot“), it’s beautifully rendered but mostly free of science fiction-y zip, with a climax that consists of a lengthy, laser gun-free spiritual debate about the nature of humanity and soulfulness; this was maybe our thirty favorite minutes in all of cinema last year. [A]
