Devils

Just when you think that the body swap film has been done to death, along comes something which reinvents it in an exciting and challenging way. More in the spirit of Face/Off that Freaky Friday, Kim Jae-Hoon’s lively action thriller is so packed full of twists that it presents a real challenge to reviewers, and it’s a lot of fun to watch.

The pretext is this: homicide detective Choi Jae-hwan (Oh Dae-hwan) is on the hunt for serial killer Jin-hyeok (Jang Dong-yoon). It’s personal as, amongst other things, Jin-hyeok has killed his brother-in-law, a fellow cop. During a chase, the two of them fight and roll down a hillside together, only to disappear. When they reappear a month later, Jae-hwan seems confused and needs hospital treatment, but he is able to hand over his adversary, who is duly placed under guard. It’s then that things get complicated, as Jin-hyeok says that he wants to tell the police the names of his murderous associates, but the only person he will speak to is earnest young officer Kim Min-seong (Jang Jae-ho). When the two of them are alone, he makes a startling announcement: he is, in face, Jae-hwan, trapped in Jin-hyeok’s body.

This is, of course, difficult for Min-seong to take seriously, but the man he is talking to seems to know things which only Jae-hwan could know – and when he visits the man who looks like his colleague, he finds him behaving out of character in ways which the memory loss which the doctors have identified cannot account for. Moved by the prisoner’s expressed fear for his wife and daughter, he agrees to help him try to get to the bottom of the mystery. The prisoner escapes but is blackmailed by his opponent, who basically has the unwitting women as his hostages, and forced to bring in the associates who, he is told, were responsible for the police getting tipped off in the first place.

All this is the prelude to some fast-paced detective work and a great deal of action, with Jin-hyeok’s associates naturally refusing to go quietly. There is a good deal more to the plot, but it is never allowed to slow down this pacey and frequently gory thriller. Both leads acquit themselves well, the immediate concerns of their characters underscored by a layer of discomfort as each is forced to reassess longstanding principles, a process which compromises them both in different ways and brings them closer together. Jang Dong-yoon starts out with a wildly aggressive. charismatic performance which recalls his work in the recent Project Wolf Hunting, so it’s interesting to see him shift gears and take on the challenge of playing an older character.

There are some great visual set pieces here. Jonathan Demme’s Silence Of The Lambs has come in for a fair bit of deserved criticism in its time, but one sequence which does deserve praise and rarely gets discussed is its final basement cat and mouse scene, the only part of that film worthy of following Michael Mann’s magnificent Manhunter. Kim delivers something similar at the start of this film, but takes it a step further, with streaks of fluorescent body paint splattered around a room obscuring both identities and motion. It’s a dreamlike sequence which immediately signals both his talent (it’s hard to believe that this is his début) and the off-kilter axis of a film which often has a lot more going on than it’s letting on.

Some viewers will feel that Devils could do with being trimmed down in places, but that’s largely a cultural thing – South Korean thrillers tend to run longer and to incorporate more acts than those made in the West. In places its convolutions make it hard to follow, and if you don’t pay attention throughout then you may find yourself completely lost. That said, it’s a film which earns that attention. A great contribution to the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival line-up, it has serious international potential, and one hopes that more audiences will have the opportunity to enjoy it on the big screen where it belongs.