3-Iron (2004)

On one hand, I've grown leery of R-rated Korean features, which aren't all as watchable as Parasite. OTOH, writer-director Kim Ki-duk did a peaceful yet adequately engaging job with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring. And 2004 was a great year for cinema in my book.

In a modern South Korean city, a possibly homeless young man, Tae-suk (Jae Hee), puts flyers on doors, picks the locks of those that leave the flyers on long enough to suggest that the residents are on vacation, and then bums around before a hasty getaway. The Netflix description makes it sound like a slice-of-life that never goes anywhere, but that would be misleading. The plot starts to progress when he stumbles on a former photography model, Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), who decides to run away with him from her physically abusive husband, Min-gyu (Kwon Hyuk-ho). She's content to go everywhere with Tae-suk -- until they discover a corpse and become implicated. And Min-gyu has an in with a dirty cop....

As home intruders go, they're considerate. They don't normally steal anything besides food, and they try not to make a mess. Tae-suk even waters the plants and sometimes repairs things. He also takes selfies with household art, and while he's not dumb enough to post them online, that's still quite a needless risk.

In case you're wondering about the title, Tae-suk does take a golf club, partly for recreation with a tied-up ball and partly as an occasional weapon. He never commits murder, but he does a lot of acts indicating a rather fuzzy sense of or regard for justice. The best I can say for him is that he never really does wrong by Sun-hwa. He doesn't even put moves on her; she determines the pace of their relationship.

Like in SSFWaS, there is very little dialog. In fact, Tae-suk never says a word, and Sun-hwa says only two short sentences in total. That might be expected of a battered woman, but what's his deal? We never do learn anything about his past except that he has a degree. As it stands, I probably could have watched without subtitles and missed nothing important. And no, I don't speak a lick of Korean.

Unusual as the quiet is, things don't get truly strange until the last act, which deliberately borders on fantasy. Heck, maybe Tae-suk or Sun-hwa daydreams it. I can think of several other movies whose endings are widely suspected to be, shall we say, at a higher level of fiction.

For moral reasons, I refrain from giving 3I high marks all around. But you may want to check it out just for being rare in an interesting way.