3-IRON

Director: Kim Ki-duk
Cast: Lee Seung-yeon, Jae Hee, Kwon Hyuk-ho, Jo Jin-mu
Runtime: 95 minutes
Country: South Korea
Rating: 14A (Violence, sexually suggestive scene, nudity)

"Alternately witty, caustic, tender and endlessly imaginative and unpredictable."

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

"All of us are empty houses, waiting anxiously for somebody to unlock and liberate us... - Kim Ki-duk

Kim Ki-duk's highly original perspective on ordinary life, so evocatively evident in his recent art house hit SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...AND SPRING B is carried to yet another extreme in his eleventh film. 3-IRON is a story of freedom found within the dull, domestic prisons erected by power, money and social convention and of a love that dispels the horrors of emotional emptiness. Homeless Tae-suk (Jae Hee) lives like a phantom; his daily routine involves squatting in houses and apartments he knows to be temporarily vacant. He never steals from nor damages his unknowing hosts' homes; rather, he is like a kind of friendly ghost, sleeping in other people's beds, eating a little food out of strangers' refrigerators and repaying their unintended hospitality by doing the laundry or making small repairs.

In one of these homes he meets Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yun), a former model who has been reduced to a withered shadow of her former self by an abusive husband who keeps her imprisoned in an affluent, pretentiously decorated house.

Destined to cross paths, Tae-suk and Sun-hwa's experiences are confined to a comfortably eerie silence and anonymity, and their increasingly invisible existences leave no trace on the world around them. Bound by unseen ties and unwilling to separate, they are quietly drawn into their bizarre new destiny. Presenting the film as a symphony of carefully orchestrated movements, Kim composes a new reality that explores yet another variation B one of great strength and creativity B on the theme of love. A film full of powerful silences, neither Tae-suk nor Sun-hwa utters a word until

the closing sequence. 3-IRON is a beautifully constructed testament to the quiet force of images and elegant, detailed compositions. A stunning and totally surprising film.

"It's a film that will stay with you."

Philip Kennicott , Washington Post