Reinventing the ‘Re’ in Revenge

In the fourth season of the TV series Lost, the antagonist Benjamin Linus tells the former Iraqi National Guard Sayid Jarrah: ‘When you let your grief turn into anger, it will never leave you’. In South Korean director Jee-woon Kim’s latest offering Akmareul boatda (I Saw the Devil), Kim Soo-hyeon (played by Byung-hun Lee; who some of us might remember as Storm Shadow in the awful GI Joe: Rise of Cobra), who works for the National Intelligence Service, has every reason to be aggrieved. His fiancée, Joo-yeon, with whom he got engaged just a month ago, has been found hacked to pieces by an unknown assailant, while she was waiting by the roadside for a tow truck.

Soo-hyeon, like his innumerable precedents on celluloid who had been wronged, promises to avenge Joo-yeon’s murder by ‘inflicting 10,000 times more pain’ on the assailant—a claim or its variant that, too, has been made time and again on the silver screen. Till then, ‘I Saw the Devil’ follows a tried-and-tested formula that lies at the core of any revenge flick. And if it had been just another entry in this sub-genre of films, it would have ended at around the 55-minute mark. Because that is when, Soo-hyeon lays his hands upon the dastardly serial killer Kyung-Chul (another bravura performance by one of the most well-known actors ever to emerge from South Korea, Min-sik Choi), after staking out three more suspects.

The evidence that Kyung-Chul is, in fact, Joo-yeon’s—and several other equally unfortunate women’s—murderer is irrefutable; the dastardliness of Kyung-Chul, irredeemable; the fury of Soo-hyeon, as he lifts a large boulder to snuff out Kyung-Chul’s life, inconsolable. So, when the passed out Kyung-Chul regains consciousness to find that all he has lost is a pint-odd of blood and the functionality of his left wrist, and has, in fact, gained a wad of currency notes left behind in an envelope, he is as surprised as us, the viewer.

That is also the precise point, when Akmareul boatda (2010) begins to deviate from other run-of-the-mill revenge flicks.

Mildly flabbergasted but largely condescending of what he deems to be his unknown attacker’s foolhardiness, it does not take the psychopathic Kyung-Chul long to pick up, from where he had left off, when it comes to hunting down women. But to his utter astonishment, whenever he finds himself a new prey, Soo-hyeon arrives out of the blue, again and again, almost on cue, and inflicts pain on Kyung-Chul that keeps getting worse.

But Kyung-Chul is no ordinary psychopath. His proclamations that others are nothing but ‘retards’ are not boastful claims, but a statement of fact. It is only a matter of time before he figures out exactly how Soo-hyeon is managing to appear at precisely the same place where Kyung-Chul is planning to devour another hapless human.

And when he does figure out, Soo-hyeon finds that in this particular psychopath, the answer to ‘Who do you think won? You or me?’ is not as simple and straightforward as it sounds.

‘Violent thriller’ is a sub-genre that has found itself resuscitated by new Korean cinema. Chan-wook Park, Jee-woon Kim, and Hong-jin Na are just three of the new breed of film directors, who have firmly put Korea onto the map of world cinema, resulting in that classic knee-jerk reaction from Hollywood—churning out remakes.

Among these three, Park maybe the most famous—after all, his Oldboy (2003) re-introduced modern Korean cinema to the world—but it is Kim, who has the most diverse filmography. His previous three films were an action-adventure (The Good, the Bad, the Weird), a crime drama (A Bittersweet Life) and a top-notch horror (A Tale of Two Sisters; remade in Hollywood in 2009 as The Uninvited). And with Akmareul boatda, Kim has broken new ground. Not only has he carried on the creative acumen that he has ostentatiously displayed in his earlier works, but has also managed to push the envelope, so much so that Akmareul boatda, because of its violent content, became the first instance in entire Korean film history to be restricted twice by the authorities. Considering the amount of violence that has perpetuated the current crop of Korean films—that tells a lot.

However, there is a lot that separates Akmareul boatda from the violent trash, tripe, and travesty that Hollywood keeps churning out on a regular basis. To begin with, Kim has made it abundantly clear that there is not much of a difference between the avenging Soo-hyeon and the atrocious Kyung-Chul. From the latter using a hammer to mercilessly dispose of Joo-hyeon, to Soo-hyeon using the same weapon on a sex-offender; from Kyung-Chul using a vehicle to pick up his unfortunate victims, to Soo-hyeon using his car to incapacitate one of his targets; from the remorseless manner in which Kyung-Chul chops off one of his preys, to the inability of Soo-hyeon to break down when he learns about his fiancée’s fate; from the instantaneous movement of Kyung-Chul’s chopper on a woman’s body, to the split-second stomping of Kyung-Chul’s wrist by Soo-hyeon; from Kyung-Chul using a dumbbell to bludgeon a guy, to Soo-hyeon bashing Kyung-Chul  with a fire extinguisher; Soo-hyeon—initially unknowingly, and then consciously—emulating a coda followed by the serial killer regarding the manner in which body parts are cut off; and last, but not least, the sweeping panning of the camera that directly connects a distraught Soo-hyeon to Kyung-Chul prowling the streets in search of his next victim—the instances are many.

While the gore is almost unbearable, the violence unapologetic, and the fierceness of both the protagonist and the antagonist unflinching, the film has its own share of dark humour, evident in the two instances when the battered Kyung-Chul tries to hitch a ride or when a psychopath calls his victims ‘crazy’.

Refreshingly, the supporting characters in Akmareul boatda do not condone Soo-hyeon’s actions. On several occasions, we hear them imploring that the path he is following will not bring back the dead, nor is it necessary to become a monster to fight one—a feature inconspicuous by its absence in the plethora of revenge films that we encounter every year.

The other interesting aspect of the film is how it has subverted a number of cinematic tropes. How often do we find a psychopath in a situation where he has to fight for his life fending off two more of his kin; the handle of a screwdriver coming off when someone tries to dislodge it from his palm; or the audience finding their sympathy being inadvertently swaying towards an immoral individual?

It is this ingenuity that is present even in the title of the film itself. The Korean phrase Akmareul boatda simply means ‘Saw the Devil’, without any subject, which can imply the devil being either Kyung-Chul or the evil that lay hidden inside Soo-hyeon, only to emerge as the film progressed.

All in all, while breathing new life into this catatonic sub-genre, the Koreans have shown that unlike the Chinese, who like to eat the dish of revenge cold, they prefer to have a second helping, and a third, and a fourth….