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88Director Kim Jee-woon's astonishing story of a serial killer who picks the wrong man's fiancée to murder, is so extreme and intense that it had to be trimmed down in its native country before it was released to theaters. We lucky westerners get to see it in all its hair-raising, stomach-churning glory, and that's a wonderful thing.
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88A terrific but uncompromising film that's definitely not for everyone.
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83If you've got the stomach for it, it's a treat.
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83A mesmerizing study of the nature of evil itself.
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83Eventually, Soo-hyun's relentless pursuit-and-release approach outlives the director's skill and the premise starts to feel redundant.
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80Plenty of people die in I Saw the Devil, but it is that first attack on Ju-yeon in the movie's opening minutes that reverberates through the epic 141-minute running time.
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80Repugnant content, grislier than the ugliest torture porn, ought to have made the film unwatchable, but it doesn't, simply because Kim's picture is so beautifully filmed, carefully structured and viscerally engaging.
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75You won't soon forget it -- if you have the guts to see it.
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75Somewhere in all the blood (sickening realism is a selling point), a question is posed: When does the one fighting a monster become a monster himself?
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70A droll Nietzschean fable that's fully aware of its lapses into absurdity.
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Mar 4, 201170There is all the violent mayhem, for certain, but the thing that sets I Saw the Devil apart is its undercurrent of real emotion and how unrelentingly sad it can be.
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67Although the sequences grow somewhat repetitive in spite of their vicious escalation, and some of the details challenge believability, I Saw the Devil is a spectacle of substantial merit.
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63A typical mixture of the artful and the repellent.
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63A thriller that makes you wish you knew how to scream "O.M.G." in Korean.
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60Ultimately, the returns of the film's premise can't justify a nearly two-and-a-half-hour squirm. The savagery is honest, raw and hardly entertainment.
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50But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.
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50An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."
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40Never good with nuance, Kim is a beast with disarming imagery but has few resonating ideas, leaving the domino-tumble of brutality to become its own tiresome spectacle.
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Mar 1, 201140On any number of levels, "Devil" is troublesome at best, offensive at worst.