Sightlines · reception

How Deliver Us from Evil was received

2020 · Hong Won-chan · Deliver Us from Evil on Sightlines

The arc

A pandemic-summer smash in Korea in 2020, it read at the time as a slick genre programmer — but a year later Squid Game turned Lee Jung-jae into a global star, and now it gets rewatched as 'the one where Gi-hun's actor plays a bleach-blond psycho.'

What’s debated

The perennial fight: is Lee Jung-jae's flamboyant villain a magnetic scene-stealer or pure scenery-chewing propping up a story that's all style, no substance?

Its footprint

It travels almost entirely on one image — Lee Jung-jae's blond, tattooed 'Ray the Butcher,' knife in hand — which became his pre-Squid Game calling card in fan edits and 'range' posts.

Where it stands

A staple of the 'Korean action essentials' Letterboxd list circuit — not canon, but the reliable 'if you liked New World and The Man from Nowhere' recommendation.

Did you know? It reunited Hwang Jung-min and Lee Jung-jae seven years after New World (2013) — but with the moral polarity flipped, and director Hong Won-chan came up co-writing Na Hong-jin's The Chaser and The Yellow Sea before turning to this kind of chase thriller himself.