Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da: Fucked Around And Found Out

Last week I expressed a certain amount of disappointment with Cerdita for taking a pretty sharp riff on a specific type of revenge film and ending it in the most obvious and cliched way possible. And now this week I find myself with another type of revenge film that has very, very few surprises to it, start to finish, but executes what it does so well that I honestly don’t mind all that much. And I think the difference lies in restraint, or the lack thereof. Cerdita kept a lot of its violence off-screen, which I think was the right choice for that film, but Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da (I Saw The Devil) puts everything right up front, and there’s something about its relentlessness and unwillingness to look away that takes a pretty by-the-numbers story and gives it a fair amount of heft.

It's a cold, snowy night, and a bus, empty but for its driver, heads down the highway, soon encountering a young woman stranded by the side of the road. She has a flat tire, and so the driver stops to offer her help. She declines, saying she’s already called a tow truck. It doesn’t matter. Things turn ugly, and soon enough she is dragged off to a dismal garage someplace and butchered. The driver dumps her remains into a stream, where they’re discovered the next day in what can only be called a shitshow of a search. She was Joo-yeon, the daughter of the local police chief, and her fiancée, Soo-hyeon, is an agent with the National Intelligence Service.

Sure, there’s going to be an official investigation, but they’re going to have to outrun Soo-hyeon, who only has one thing on his mind.

So this is the setup. Soo-hyeon is a man with a particular set of skills, who has lost someone dear to him and knows some people in the police department. This could easily be something similar to a Korean take on Taken, but it isn’t. First of all, it’s not dour monologuing broken up by explosions, slick and glossy in its mayhem. It’s something grubbier, more raw and tough to watch than that. It depicts Kyung-chul - a school bus driver who satisfies his hatred of women through kidnapping, torture, and murder - as crude and angry, something oafish and not especially clever. And Soo-hyeon doesn’t waste a lot of time on angst. He’s a professional, used to tracking people down and setting his feelings aside until the job is done. And we know this not because he tells us, but because he shows us through his utter calm, his impassive face, all while he’s doing terrible things to the man who murdered his fiancée, things to which he displayed grief and horror before he decided to make it his mission. Because he isn’t just content to track him down and make a big speech and shoot him. No, this is catch-and-release, where Soo-hyeon finds Kyung-chul, takes something away from him, and then lets him go, all to wonder when he’s going to pop up next. Soo-hyeon doesn’t just want Kyung-chul to die, he wants him to suffer.

The result is an excruciatingly violent film, simultaneously graphic and dispassionate. It doesn’t feel gratuitous - as much happens off-camera as on - nor does it feel like the camera is leering at violent spectacle. It hurts to watch what’s happening to people, even the ones we don’t like, because it’s unflinching and there’s visible suffering. Women are constantly, routinely victimized in places and ways that suggest that Kyung-chul isn’t some kind of criminal mastermind, but rather some barely controlled id, heedless of getting caught, so intent is he on satisfying his appetites how and when he wants to. Scenes where he hurts others and ones where he is the one being hurt play out exactly the same, which suggests that violence is violence, no matter the justification or context. There’s more than a whiff of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer around it in that respect - everything around Kyung-chul seems to happen in sort of a shadow world of petty criminals and criminals with bigger, stranger appetites, a world that comes out late at night, where everyone is a predator as bad or worse than him. It feels like the violence he brings into Soo-hyeon’s life is not an aberration, but just what lies out there in the dark, once everyone else has gone home. It’s what lies behind closed doors in remote areas, on the streets, in cabs and buses. It’s been there the whole time, now he’s just aware of it.

It's a long film, and it feels long, though it doesn’t drag much. The length makes itself known in shots that stretch out just a little longer than you expect, pacing that takes its time (until it doesn’t - this is a film where not much happens until all kinds of horrible shit happens all at once). It does feel a little padded in places, but not too much, and in its climax it sews everything up tight, bringing it full circle back to a dark road at night and a lonely ramshackle building out in the middle of nowhere, paying off early details. There are long stretches of silence - music only makes itself known at the height of especially intense moments, otherwise the rest of the film, stylishly shot for the most part, just lets things play out, however long that takes, so even scenes that just require someone to respond to a question develop a certain feeling of tension. It’s a film where we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Subtitles mean a couple of moments come off more humorous than I think was intended, though there is some effective black comedy as well. Settings are generally squalid - garages, abandoned hotels, apartments as filthy as they are tiny, and a lot of the film takes place at night, in the dark. Again, until it doesn’t and everything is laid bare by the light of day. In that sense it reminds me of Se7en, a film that feels more lightless than it actually is, one where having the antagonist show up in broad daylight feels a little obscene.

There’s definitely a formula to revenge films - how far is too far, don’t fight monsters unless you want to become a monster, revenge carries a terrible cost, etc. And this film definitely hews to the formula, though it saves the most on-the-nose stuff for the third act. But it also doesn’t descend completely into cliché. It never really felt to me like Soo-hyeon’s humanity was ever in question, and Kyung-chul wasn’t really redeemable in any way. Repellent, sadistic and utterly unapologetic, it’s difficult even at the film’s worst, when he is brought lowest, to say that maybe this is too much. His humanity is never in doubt, he's just someone for whom only his own life has value and everyone else exists to sate his appetites. And the end, as fitting (and in some ways typical) an end to a revenge film as you could ask for, also highlights the cost Soo-hyeon has paid, as the feelings he’s been burying to focus on the mission finally crash down on him all at once. You get the sense that Kyung-chul learned nothing, and Soo-hyeon learned too much. Either way, they both got involved with something much bigger than they expected. They fucked around and found out.

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