Fantasia Fest 2023– Film Review

Devils is a spiteful snuff movie serial killer thriller from South Korea, of course, featuring superb dual lead performances and an insane twist you will never see coming.

Tenacious detective Jae-hwan is hell-bent on bringing day-glow online murder monster Jin-hyeok to justice after he butchers his brother-in-law. The two clash on a mountainside and tumble into a ravine only to go AWOL for a whole month.

When they resurface in a handcuffed car crash they have swapped bodies and Jin-hyeok blackmails the now-arrested Jae-hwan into coughing up all his s and intimate memories under the threat he will “rape and rip apart” his wife and daughter. In response, Jae-hwan absconds and initiates a desperate mission to protect his family and regain his true identity.

If all that seems a little mental that’s nothing compared to where Kim Jae-hoon‘s debut picture is prepared to go in order to dive headfirst into a morally bankrupt cesspool that makes I Saw the Devil seem like a police ethics training video. It is not as wantonly violent or stylised as previous South Korean classics such as Oldboy and A Bittersweet Life, but it more than makes up for it with its thoroughly perverse penchant for scorched earth psychological warfare.

The action sequences are a little more pedestrian than genre fans have grown accustomed to but that is purely a budgetary issue as Devils makes the judicious call to remain within its financial boundaries instead of crutching on second-rate CGI that removes the audience from the theatre of carnage. When the film charges into the nasty no man’s land of torture porn it keeps things practical and is all the more nasty for it.

Oh Dae-hwan and Jang Dong-yoon are amazing as the cop and killer respectively but it is impossible to credit them with the praise they deserve here as doing so would involve a trip to spoiler town. Suffice it to say, much of the movie’s success is down to their intense portrayals of outliers in their own worlds, and more essentially, each other.

The bodyswap horror/thriller mechanic is nothing new. Face/Off, The Immortalizer, Freaky, Shocker, and to some extent, the Child’s Play franchise are all fine examples of how identity hijack has become a genre staple. What sets Devils apart from its peers is the sheer midnight movie madness it exerts on the concept to drag it from improbable and lazy to batshit and fucking crazy.

Kim Jae-hoon‘s 90’s tinged Cat III throwback may not be entirely original in premise but it is in execution. The timeline can’t be linear in order to spring its delirious traps, yet it is masterfully edited so as to keep it easily digestible and engaging. The revelations are both ingenious and utterly illogical and the parameters are as random as blood splatters but it pivots in such demented directions that you won’t care. It certainly doesn’t. Just go in as blind as possible, strap in, and enjoy the dark plunge into ugly moralistic decay.

Anti-humanist and devoid of any remorse for its tasteless excesses, Devils is a reckless hunting dog of a film that refuses to run with the pack. Seedy, swarthy, and slippery as a sweating eel fans of murky South Korean cinema will lap it up.

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE