‘Devils’ is Body-Swapping the South Korean Way [Fantasia 2023]

There is a particular sense of grounded savagery audiences have come to expect from South Korean genre cinema. Melodrama and visceral bouts of violence often coalesce into a broader, grim portrait of humanity, and the fun regularly comes with gruesome caveats. Last year’s Fantasia Festival offering The Witch: Part 2, for instance, expanded on its predecessors superhero origins with more destruction and a higher body count. This year’s festival features the North American premiere of director Kim Jae-hoon’s Devils, a body swap thriller that gets bigger, bolder, and unfortunately more conventional as it goes.

Oh Dae-hwan stars as Jae-hwan, a homicide detective whose efforts to track down and apprehend Jin-hyuk (Jang Dong-yoon, this year’s fantastic Project Wolf Hunting), leader of a digital collective of serial killers, has Freaky results. After a catastrophic car chase, Jae-hwan pursues on foot. Soon thereafter, he and Jin-hyuk tumble into a ravine and inexplicably vanish. A month later, they reappear in a vehicular accident, and upon transport to the hospital, Jae-hwan wakes up in Jin-hyuk’s body. Young, green partner Min-Sung (Jang Jae-ho) is Jae-hwan’s only hope of switching back.

Early beats of intrigue yield promise, most notably in Jin-hyuk’s body-swapped threats. In possessing Jae-hwan’s body, he easily slips into his life, threatening the real detective in private. He tasks the detective-swapped-killer to track down his accomplices and bring them in, retribution for having tipped the police off in the first place. Min-Sung’s procedural prowess proves invaluable, and as Devils shifts into its second act, the film ostensibly becomes something like a buddy cop drama with interludes of extreme violence. Only, like the best (and worst) of Korean genre cinema, Devils soon collapses under the weight of its aspirations. Incredulous twists pile up one after another, and while the committed work of the cast– Jang Dong-yoon especially, shifting between cop and serial killer with perverse ease—maintains interest, the unwieldy plot falls apart.

Devils uncomfortably wades into police brutality territory, satisfying the gore quotient while remaining noncommittal toward whether police should be justified in skirting the laws no differently than the criminals they chase down. While never quite so egregious to be called Copaganda, a modern portmanteau applied to media whose police depictions veer uncomfortably positive, the blurred lines between hero and villain are frustratingly vague, with action beats and gory staging both wanting its cake and eating it too.

Yet, Devils is admirably uncompromising in its depiction of urban serial killer networks and the fractured detectives tasked with apprehending them. Often gag-inducing, Kim Jae-hoon mimics the best, drawing from Na Hong-jin’s frenetic footwork and Lee Chung-Hyun’s visceral spurts of extreme gore. Car batteries have never been this frightening.

Devils gamely joins a pantheon of extreme South Korean action/horror cinema. While regularly familiar, reminding audiences of the tropes and action sequences they’ve seen better executed elsewhere, it’s nonetheless a promising debut. Tonally and thematically, Kim Jae-hoon has accomplished more than mere pantomime here. While frustratingly constrained by the genre’s expectations, there are inimitable wrinkles here that signal Kim Jae-hoon as a filmmaker to watch. His violent debut may not be a classic, though as a midnighter with mainstream appeal, there’s enough blood shed here to render him an exciting new voice in Korean genre cinema. 

A strong cast overcomes predictable plotting in Kim Jae-hoon’s feature debut Devils. Fans of the genre won’t find anything new here, but not every dog needs to learn new tricks. Graphic violence and a plot brazenly indifferent to logic elevate Devils’ weaker moments. A deranged body swap thriller with bite, Devils easily reminds audiences of why South Korea is home to some of the best hybrid horror cinema around.

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