Korea I. Ki-duk Kim

We cooked all the fish we used in the film and ate them, expressing our appreciation. I've done a lot of cruelty on animals in my films. And I will have a guilty conscience for the rest of my life.

Director Ki-duk Kim commenting on The Isle (2000), in the making of which many animals were harmed; assorted fish and frogs are caught, bludgeoned, peeled, electrocuted, gutted and eaten alive. Kim does not spare his own species here or in Bad Guy (2001) from a steady regimen of gorings and the occasional unmentionable employ of fishhooks (simulated, I pray). The critters at least are exempt from inevitable bondage to a life of prostitution, unlike the women. A rough survey depicts Kim's characters tending to sadism as a pastime between stops on the daily circuit of squatting, fucking, killing and eating (there is a great deal of each).

But lest I make Kim's movies sound overly like torture porn or the more disposable entries at a J-horror geekshow, I voice a reedy protest that his long passages of meditative quiet, photographed and measured with deliberate, lyrical beauty, raise a somewhat ambiguous mist of regret over the events. He would seem to regard an amorally feral existence (such as all children are born into) and its attendant suffering as inherent to us and possibly suitable — not as punishment for original sin, but as a factual reflection of our place as animals in the natural world. Kim even suggests that the life of lofty pursuits brings a keener pain; his most despairing character is the boy in The Isle, an artist who twists delicate sculptures out of wire and wants to die. His female foil and the eponymous Bad Guy, on the other hand, are feral survivors. They do love, but in a brutal manner that demands painful self-sacrifice and cruel rites of purification, as if all attachments had to be expunged before the uncanny bond of a mated pair can be struck. This is a fearfully close approach to the excruciating oeuvre of Lars von Trier.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2004) offers Kim's only alternative to these bittersweet lives: The placid retreat of a solitary Buddhist monk, where a gentler comity with one's nature can be achieved by following the path of ultimate isolation and, in the end, transcendental suicide. Sadly, this is not for everyone.