Going to the theatre in Toronto is fantastic. We get to part of the audience for the first showing ever of the uncensored version of the South Korean movie I SAW THE DEVIL at one of the world's best international film festivals alongside the director.
While waiting for the movie to begin at the University of Toronto's Isabel Bader theatre a young man in the front row with me pulled out his knitting. Be yourself even if it makes you different then everyone
around you, is what I say. FANtastic.
The movie is considered brutal and bloody, hence the two censorings in South Korean before its release. What it really does it to show just how low and animallistic humans can sink to. The pressing question is should we sink to their level in order to deal with them and if so do we lose our humanity in the process.
I found the movie interesting and enjoyable but only scratching the surface of the material. It is all about revenge which is a good thing because I found the idea of how easily they found who the bad guy was unbelievable, especially since it seemed hard for the police, who are not shown in a good light at all.
Byung-hun Lee (THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE WEIRD and G.I JOE) and Min-sik Choi (OLD BOY and LADY VENGEANCE) do excellent jobs as the revengeful secret agent and the no morals at all bad guy, respectively. The excellent acting and show everything horror are what makes the movie so enjoyable.
Director Ji-woon Kim says he likes to make each movie in a different genre then the ones before. I SAW THE DEVIL can be said to be a mixture of the Horror of A TALE OF TWO SISTERS and bizarre happenings of THE GOOD, THE BAD and THE WEIRD.
One of the scariest things of the movie is the hinting at of a network of "super villains" or as they are called in the movie crazy sick bastard psychos.
A very enjoyable movie, even with a few holes and some other threads would have liked to seen developed more and easily the best out of the four I have seen so far at TIFF 2010.
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