I Saw the Devil

• The Korea Media Rating Board twice slapped the film with a 'Restricted Screening' rating, which in practice bars commercial release because no theaters in the country show such films, objecting to a scene of a corpse being dismembered and body parts eaten by people and a dog. Kim Jee-woon made seven cuts totaling roughly 80 to 90 seconds to land an '18' certificate on the third submission and get it into theaters in August 2010.
• The film reunited director Kim Jee-woon with Choi Min-sik for the first time in 14 years, since the 1998 black comedy The Quiet Family. Kim had been prepping a project to break into Hollywood and pivoted to this one on Choi's recommendation. It was also Choi's first commercial film in five years, since Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.
• It was made for roughly $6 million and grossed around $13 million worldwide.
• The version Magnet Releasing put out in the US is the 'International Cut' running about 142 minutes, which is not simply the uncensored Korean theatrical print restored. It is a separate edit, and it actually drops a rough sex scene that appears in the longer Korean cut.
• It had its US premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January 2011.
• Cinematography is by Lee Mo-gae, Kim Jee-woon's regular collaborator, who also shot A Tale of Two Sisters and The Good, the Bad, the Weird.

The film argues that revenge isn't a path to justice but a transmission vector. Soo-hyun's catch-and-release torture doesn't diminish Kyung-chul; it teaches him, hardens him, and lets him keep killing. By the final act the agent has become the monster's instrument, and the closing shot of him breaking down on the street reads as the moment he realizes he traded his humanity for nothing.

Kyung-chul is less a man than an embodiment of evil that can't be contained or corrected, only fed. Every time Soo-hyun lets him go, the killer immediately finds new victims, suggesting the agent's plan was always doomed because you can't punish something that experiences cruelty as appetite rather than suffering.

The structure deliberately collapses the line between protagonist and antagonist. The two men keep mirroring each other's tactics until the 'hero' is staging elaborate cruelties of his own, implying the only real difference between vengeance and murder is the story you tell yourself about why you're doing it.

An intelligence agent's pregnant fiancée is butchered by a serial killer, and instead of killing the man, the agent decides to make him suffer. He plants a tracker, lets the predator hunt again, then breaks him and releases him, over and over, turning vengeance into a private game with no exit. Kim Jee-woon flips the cat-and-mouse formula until you can't tell who the cat is. The grief curdles into something colder, and the closer the agent gets to his prey, the more he starts to resemble it.