Tag: South Korea

The Isle [섬/Seom] (2000)

Hard to Swallow

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

*The following review contains descriptions of suicide, torture and animal cruelty.

The Isle features one of the more unique film settings I’ve ever encountered, taking place at a lake resort full of little floating platforms with huts placed atop, in which patrons rest, sleep and (and most significantly for this film) fish. I do find myself questioning the logic and safety implications of such a setup, yet it turns out such resorts do exist in South Korea known as Jwadae Naksi (좌대낚시), literally “platform fishing.” Information regarding these resorts is very limited in English (googling the romanised name yields no results), although this international obscurity makes the setting of The Isle all the more mysterious and dream-like (with director Kim Ki-duk employing a similar setting in his later film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring). With this secluded setting and heavy emphasis on the surrounding nature, The Isle captures the introverted desire to be left alone. The opening scenes featuring the resort covered in a blanket of morning fog, with the aquatic-sounding music score, capture a sense of peace and tranquillity.

The resort in The Isle is operated by a mute, nameless woman (Suh Jung), although her name is credited as Hee-jin. The resort is very much her domain, in which she facilitates the men staying there with prostitutes and offers her own sexual services. Like other characters in Kim Ki-duk’s films, Hee-jin utters no dialogue throughout the entire film, yet so much is conveyed without it with her alluring yet threatening presence (as memorably captured on the film’s poster). There is a strong mythological element to her character, as she is comparable to the archetype of a nymph or the mould of a mermaid. Her attire of a long skirt mirrors that of a mermaid’s fin, while her seemingly supernatural ability to get out of the water and into a boat so fast or the recreation of the Captain Willard head rise out of the water echoes that of a mermaid (and with the water being her domain, this neatly ties alongside the symbolism of water as a representation of the feminine). Moreover, her role echoes that of Lady Wakasa in Ugetsu (1953) or the titular character in Woman In The Dunnes (1964), keeping the men as prisoners in her domain (early in the film, she even kills one of her patrons after he openly disrespects her following sexual services).

Hee-jin, however, does develop sympathy (and eventually falls for) one of her customers, a depressed, suicidal fugitive named Hyun-shik (Kim Yu-seok), who takes refuge at the resort to evade the authorities following a murder. He is, remarkably, the closest thing the resort has to a sympathetic male character (as sympathetic as you can get for someone who has murdered and attempted rape), compared to the other men who are all outright abusive and unpleasant. However, I have to say the film’s male lead is not terribly interesting (lacking the characterisation of his female co-star), and he does weaken the film overall. Although his character may be uninteresting, what he inflicts upon himself is anything but.

According to Roger Ebert in his review for The Isle, audience members gasped and walked out during the film’s screening at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001. The scene in question involves Hyun-shik quickly devising an impromptu way to kill himself (as he lost his gun earlier in a botched suicide attempt) when he sees that police have arrived at the resort to arrest him. So what is this way he is going to unalive himself? He gets a string of fishhooks, which he places inside his mouth and attempts to swallow, causing him to bleed profusely out of his mouth (possibly an ineffective way to kill yourself, but I guess when you’re about to be arrested by the police, you stop thinking rationally).

I’ve never been fishing, but I have handled hooks in the past, and they are something I feel squeamish about even touching, and I know I’m not alone in that thought, which I feel really makes this scene so difficult to watch without looking away from the screen. But it doesn’t end there (far from it). As Hee-jin arrives in the hut before the police, she hides Hyun-shik under the platform, dangling from a rod with the hooks still in his mouth. After the police leave, she then reels him back up with the rod like a literal fish (I can’t possibly think of a more graphic metaphor for the power dynamics between a man and woman). However, if this is not enough on-screen torture for you, Hee-jin later ups the ante with her own fishhook suicide attempt, only this time placing the hooks inside her vagina (bringing new meaning to the word hooker, amirite? *ba dum tiss!).

Following both of these suicide attempts, the opposite person removes the hooks from their respective body parts with pliers as they recover from the pain. I find both of these moments oddly satisfying to watch, as they represent a gradual relief after having endured the most unimaginable pain. Hee-jin even makes love to Hyun-shik after his own attempt as a way of easing the pain, which is soon followed by the ultimate consummation of their relationship in the film’s most oddly endearing scene of domesticity, as the two paint the floating hut bright yellow.

The Isle also includes several instances of animal cruelty. This includes the on-screen death of a frog, the electrocution of a fish and the slaughter of a fish (which is then returned to the lake in its mutilated form). Any Western perceptions on the reverence of certain animals over others are reflected in the fact that the Australian release I watched does feature one piece of censorship at 35:06 in which there is a visible cut in which a dog is pulled by the leash onto a boat, whereas the rest of the animal cruelty remained in this edition of the film. I hear many accounts that Kim Ki-Duk is not well regarded in his home country or among the South Korean filmmaking elite. I’d imagine this is due in part to the politically incorrect nature of his work, from the aforementioned treatment of animals to female characters who exist outside the progressive 21st-century norm (alongside accusations of assault made against the director). His work in my ways can be hard to swallow but is worth digesting, and that is a factor in why I find him to be the Korean filmmaker I’m most fascinated by.

3-Iron [빈집/Binjip] (2004)

A Little Less Conversation…

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

Is it harder to construct a film with little or no dialogue compared to the average parlance-filled production? While the general rule of filmmaking is “show, don’t tell”, dialogue is still an important tool for revealing character motivations, relationships, plot information, themes, emotional states, etc. Since the majority of movies in existence (barring silent pictures) are comprised of characters speaking to each other, to watch a movie with this tool stripped out, it really makes you consider all that goes into the art of storytelling through only visual means. 3-Iron (Binjip) is one of several productions in which (the late) director Kim Ki-duk excels at this very feat. 

Not a single word is spoken by the two leads in 3-Iron (almost), yet the film still creates compelling characters through only visual means. The film’s initially unnamed young protagonist (Jae Hee) (later revealed to be called Tae-Suk) is a drifter who enters and lives in people’s homes while they are on vacation. However, he is likely not a poor man. He is a well-groomed, pretty boy with an expensive motorcycle and a passion for golf (hence 3-Iron), suggesting that perhaps wealth aids this dangerous and unethical hobby of his.

This pastime is aided by his technical know-how. He can identify when no one is home by placing restaurant flyers on the doors of homes, and when the flyer hasn’t been taken down after a period of time, he picks the door lock and makes his way in (as well as listening to the messages on the answering machines inside). From there, he treats the dwelling like his own home (watching TV, taking a bath, self-pleasuring himself in bed). Tae-suk, however, is not a thief (at least not in the traditional sense). He keeps the homes he has broken into clean, does the laundry, waters plants and even fixes broken electronics, thus helping create empathy from the viewer. This, however, doesn’t undo the ethical dimension of his actions. In much of the world, the protection of private property is held as sacrosanct and for good reason. To have someone break into your house feels incredibly violatory and people even end up moving house because of it. Why does Tae-suk partake in this hobby? Is he simply a thrill seeker and/or mentally unwell (especially since he remains mute) or a perverted voyeurist (his collection of selfies taken alongside family portraits would suggest so)?

These sequences of Tae-suk scouting and then breaking into people’s homes feel very reminiscent of French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville. In particular, his seminal film Le Samouraï (1967), which, like 3-Iron, depicts lengthy dialogue-free sequences in which illegal activity is perpetrated in meticulous detail but with a sense of calm and harmony. From the quiet, empty scenes of the suburban streets of Seoul to the film’s wide showcase of Korean home design, 3-Iron has a sense of comforting domesticity. Likewise, the film even acts as a nostalgic representation of the pre-Internet of Things world with its array of early 2000’s tech. Although the most memorable filming location present in the film is Seoul’s famous Bukchon Hanok Village, a residential area comprised of picturesque traditional Korean houses known as Hanok. Having been there myself in 2025, I can say there is no way that the officials monitoring visitors would allow anyone to attach flyers to the doors nowadays (although I don’t know if that would have been the case either in 2004).

Tae-suk’s blurred world of fantasy vs reality comes to a head when he finds out he is not alone in the house of a wealthy businessman, when he meets his abused and black-eyed laden wife (Lee Seung-yun). Like Tae-suk, she is also mute but is able to portray a sense of torment through purely visual means. Not fearing Tae-suk, the two form a bond and leave the house together to escape her abusive marriage, all while, as a viewer, I ask myself if they will ever actually break their silence. The law, however, eventually catches up to the two delinquents, with Tae-suk thrown in prison and the wife returned to her abusive husband. 

Depending on how you choose to interpret the final act of 3-Iron, Tae-suk may have died during his incarceration and became a literal ghost (as indicated later by his weight scale reading of “0”), or through the stealth manovers he learnt during this period (to avoid the regular beatings of a corrupt officer), has escaped from prison and has had a metaphorical transformation into a ghost. The following portion of the film plays out like a semi-horror film in which, through a series of voyeuristic point-of-view shots (even feeling quite Michael Myers-esque), he gets revenge on a corrupt police officer who wronged him, with the 3-Iron and some golf balls as his weapon of choice.

Tae-suk returns to the house of the abused woman, where the blurring of fantasy and reality reaches its zenith. Tae-suk remains in the house in view of the wife, while the husband is unaware of his presence. The woman smiles for the first time and utters her only line in the movie, “I love you”. The husband thinks the line is directed at him, but it’s actually to Tae-suk standing behind him. All three characters are now living a lie, yet for perhaps the first time in the film, all three appear content. “It’s hard to tell the world we live in is either a reality or a dream”.

Joint Security Area [공동경비구역 JSA] (2000)

Crossing The Rubicon

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

What would possess someone to willingly want to cross the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) from the safety, prosperity and freedom in the south to the communist, oppressive, hermit kingdom in the north? One such scene in Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (JSA) shows the baseball cap of a tourist being blown off their head in the wind and into the northern side of the JSA (a portion within the wider DMZ), to which they naturally don’t even think about crossing that borderline to go and get it back. In the 21st century, the DMZ is the last remaining piece of the Iron Curtain, an international Rubicon, a seeming point of no return, a barrier one would never imagine wanting to cross from the southern side. Despite being set at one of the most volatile places on Earth, the story of Joint Security Area is localised and condensed to the relationship between a group of soldiers and the investigator sent to uncover the truth of their border crossing exploits.

Major Sophie Jean (Lee Young-ae) of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, the Swiss investigator of Korean descent, is tasked with solving the whodunnit in a “perfectly neutral” manner alongside her Swedish partner (Herbert Ulrich). As the audience surrogate, she is soon provoked by southern authorities with such comments as “There are two types of people in this world, commie bastards and the commie bastard’s enemies”. The North Korean authorities, on the other hand, present her with a series of staged theatrics, including an apparent grieving North Korean family, to dealing with a deposition made and signed by a man in a coma. The first act of JSA follows the Rashomon model, in which a series of contradictory stories are presented. This act of the film also plays out as a procedural in classic CSI-like style with the man-woman duo interviewing witnesses and presenting their forensic findings to each other (with the film not holding back any punches with some very graphic gunshot wounds), with Young-ae bringing a feminine presence to an otherwise male-centric movie. The English present in the film does sound very unnatural, although one could argue this would be the case since none of the characters are native speakers of the language.

The middle portion of JSA pivots to a lengthy flashback, as two South Korean soldiers (Lee Byung-hun and Kim Tae-woo) come to befriend several soldiers from the North and start crossing the border every night simply to hang out with them. The bromance they share becomes endearing as they share southern contraband, including pop music tapes, cookies and Choco Pies, while also engaging in male bonding behaviour: looking at nudie mags, cracking jokes, giving playful jabs at each other and at one point, giving a fart as a present. There is still a real cinematic nature to these intimate moments, such as the use of two 360-degree shots during conversation, with Song Kang-ho delivering the standout performance among the soldiers as the North Korean Sgt. Oh Kyeong-pil, the domineering and alpha personality of the group. Joint Security Area was filmed on a mass recreation of the DMZ, and the sets never feel inauthentic and look indistinguishable from the real thing. I recommend watching the making-of documentary for JSA (included in the Arrow Blu-ray release) in which one of the film’s costume designers states that just a few years prior to the film’s production, he may have been breaking South Korean law by recreating North Korean military uniforms.

The partition of Korea is the division of a single ethnic group; thus, there is an understanding by many in South Korea that northerners are still their fellow Koreans. This can be seen symbolised by the scene in which the saliva from both a northern and southern soldier is mixed together at the borderline, as well as a prominent shot of the full moon as a soldier throws a package across to the north. In literature and K-dramas, the moon often evokes nostalgia or longing, especially for someone far away. This shared humanity across the border brings to mind historical events such as the football game during the Christmas Day truce in World War I. However, within the flashback of JSA, there is still an underlying suspicion that the northern soldiers are just trying to get the southern soldiers to defect, with a dose of Treasure of the Sierra Madre-style tension. If there is a main recurring theme in Joint Security Area, it is that of façades. Major Jean comes to learn that the real purpose of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission is to bury the truth on behalf of both sides, that neutrality is simply a façade. From fake grieving families, fake depositions, questionable friendships and apparent loyalty citizens claim that they hold to regimes, to even Jean herself removing her own father from a family photograph.

With the Korean DMZ being one of the final remnants of the Cold War, which still exists in the 21st century, Joint Security Area has a real old-school vibe (“Rice is communism”, proclaims an archaic billboard on the northern side of the divide). This sense of historical statis is just one of many reasons as to why of the 200-odd nations which inhabit this planet, none are quite so fascinating as The Democratic People’s Republic Of Korea (better known as North Korea). I am a North Korea obsessive (a North Koreaboo if you will) and will consume any bit of media which will increase my knowledge of NK lore. Needless to say, in April 2025, I fulfilled my dream of almost entering this hermit kingdom by visiting The Demilitarized Zone and getting (at closest) 140 metres from the Korean border. Unfortunately, I couldn’t visit the Joint Security Area itself, but could still bring some pieces of the JSA and wider DMZ back with me.