Why shocking Asian imports like I Saw The Devil deserve to be seen.

Last weekend, I skipped out on a party. It promised to be full of people whose company I enjoy, with plentiful drinks and good music in their spacious house. Had I gone, I certainly would have had a great time doing what I like doing more than anything, which is drinking and chatting with fun and interesting people.

And yes, this is relevant to what I chose to do instead, which is track down the one theater in Los Angeles playing the super-violent Korean revenge movie, I Saw The Devil — directed by Ji-Woon Kim (The Good, The Bad, The Weird; A Tale of Two Sisters), starring Byung-hun Lee (TGTBTW) and Min-sik Choi (Oldboy).

The premise of I Saw The Devil is very straightforward: a government agent finds out his wife has been gruesomely murdered by a serial killer, and sets out to find and punish the man who destroyed his life. But punishment doesn’t begin to describe what follows. For this agent, simply killing or imprisoning the monster won’t be enough; only by inflicting an equal amount of pain will he feel that justice has been done.

As one can imagine, this pursuit gets disturbing quickly. The bulk of the film follows the main character as he tracks, subdues, and essentially tortures the object of his fury. Though the chase elements make for great suspense, the violence of the confrontations is brutal. I fully admit that this movie made me cringe, curl up in a ball, avert my eyes and hope for scenes to end soon, in more than one place. And yet, I thought the movie was great.

Why is that? The acts of the characters in I Saw The Devil aren’t much different from those of the ‘torture porn’ movies that seem to be cranked out annually, and which I hate for replacing what we used to call horror with vapid gore-fests. Nasty, nasty things are done in this film, as they are in other intense Asian imports like Oldboy and Ichi the Killer, movies which I also love and respect. Why the difference?

At first I thought it may just be international bias. “Oh, sure, gratuitous violence is fine in the confines of an art theater, behind subtitles, in a movie that most people have probably never heard of. But in a mainstream Halloween-time schlock movie, no way. That’s for the animals.”

I realized that wasn’t it though, as my stomach unclenched on the way home from the Laemmle’s. The difference is that the violence in these movies is something that American movies are forgetting how to do, which is the right kind of violence for the right reasons. That is, violence that is both a) actually supposed to upset the viewer, not give them a gleeful sense of blood lust, and b) entirely driven by character motivations contained within the film, as conveyed by talented actors.

When we watch Lee’s protagonist perform increasingly savage acts, we stop being on his side. We want him to stop, not because the villain doesn’t deserve it, but because through the fingers we hold up to cover the bloody brutality, we can see him losing his humanity. There’s no pleasure in this, only desperation, anger, fear. Real emotions. Real, but unsettling.

And yet understandable, because the role is played by an actor with real ability. We feel his loss and pain, and can see it taking him over. Just as we know the unfeeling depravity of his victim, the killer, played in an (I’d argue) Oscar-worthy performance by Choi that rivals Hopkins’ Lecter. Though this isn’t the cold calculation of Silence of the Lambs, or the emotionally blunted but occasionally explosive Oldboy. Here he’s unhinged, inhuman. An unstoppable force who does see violence as a gleeful pleasure, which the film is deliberate in condemning. But both characters do what they do for a reason, each character is grounded in their own twisted logic. None of this is pointless B-movie exploitation. One sick individual infects the other, and in watching that story unfold, we are rightfully sickened, but hopefully not infected ourselves.

Which brings me back to seeing this movie instead of going to a nice, fun party. If art is supposed to expand our human understanding, take us places and show us things we might not otherwise experience, this movie accomplishes that no matter how bloody the journey. Chances are I’ll never go to the dark places these characters go. Let’s hope not anyway. I will, however, go to lots of fun parties where I drink and chat with friends, but only once in a great while will one of those parties really get inside my head and affect me this strongly. Sometimes the easy pleasant option isn’t always the most interesting. Just because a thing is shocking, or even sickening, doesn’t mean it can’t be worthwhile.

Though I Saw The Devil may be difficult to watch, it has value as art for that reason. It made me feel something few movies do, as brutal and boundary-pushing as that something may be. That’s why I can “enjoy” these fucked up Eastern horror-dramas that lots of people would just call weird and gross, while feeling totally justified looking down on each successive Saw sequel. The former are rooted in emotion and skillfully performed. They do violence right.

The latter? They’re just disgusting for all the wrong reasons.