Kang dong won girlfriend n second place for the men was Psychic Kang Dong-won with 8.3% of the votes with a close third going to Ahjusshi Won Bin. A surprising second place for the women went to comedienne Shin Bong-sun with 14.7% of the vote and the cutest gumiho ever, Shin Mina, came in third.If it were me, I’d pick Kang Daesung, possibly Yoo Jae-suk, or maybe Kim Hyung-joong, no Oh Ji-ho? Ah, decisions, decisionsThere are now several cuts of the film, but the one director Kim brought was the “export” version, which is the Korean version plus some stuff that was considered too strong for the domestic market (who didn't go to see it anyway). In synopsis form, it appears to be a simple cat-and-mouse story, but I Saw The Devil is far more than that – the cat finds the mouse very early on in proceedings, and goes on to torment him for some 90 minutes – until the mouse finds some pretty tricky ways to fight back. In the broadest sense, it's really a serial-killer movie, since that's what kick-starts the story: the girlfriend of top secret agent Dae-hoon (Byung Hun-Lee) is brutally murdered – and I mean brutally murdered – by the psychopathic Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), so Dae-hoon sets out for revenge. But not simply to kill him – Dae-hoon wants to torment Kyung-chul both physically and mentally, feeding his prey a homing device that enables the hunter to find him at any time.
The violence here is astonishing; outside a Saw movie, I don't think I've seen so many varied implements so inventively used. But director Kim never hides behind camp or even metaphor; what he's doing here is making a claustrophobic statement about the futility of vengeance: Dae-hoon and Kyung-chul just keep going at each other (and I have to say that Choi Min-sik is absolutely unbelievable in the role). The other great thing about I Saw The Devil, though, is that its repetitions never get boring – director Kim throws in so many diversions (including a cannibal couple and a pair of rival psychopaths) that it feels like a bizarre and bloody Pilgrim's Progress. I Saw The Devil is out here in May (I think), and it will be interesting to see what fans of his previous works – The Good, The Bad, The Weird especially – will make of it. It may be a little too long, but it's a provocative film that's healthily aware of its transgressions. I heard someone grumbling about having “problems with the third act” but that's why I love Korean directors. They don't give a fuck!
The festival ended with Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid, which was criminally overlooked at Cannes this year. While everyone was raving about Uncle Bore-me, director Im's warped psychological study of evil – a remake, in name only, I suspect, of a famous 1960 Korean movie – went ignored. Which is a shame, since, on second viewing, it really is an interesting piece of work. To recap: a naive blue-collar girl gets a job with a rich family. The woman of the household is heavily pregnant with her second child, so her sexually frustrated husband starts an affair with the maid. When the maid gets pregnant, her superior tells the wife's mother, who instigates a campaign of harassment in the hopes of making the girl give up her child, either by miscarriage or abortion. The original sounds to be much more of a crazy-nanny movie, but in this movie the rich family are definitely the bad guys, and it's their frightening sense of entitlement that gives the film its scares. But director Im has a lot more going on than just that, and what struck me on seeing it again is just how weird some of his choices are. The beginning, for example, shows a girl committing suicide in a busy street; it's there for a reason, but the reason is more poetic than strictly narrative. The same goes for the final scene, which is both inexplicable and deliciously surreal. The result is a very edgy psychodrama that might make for an interesting double-bill with Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.
