3-Iron

Original title: Bin-Jip (Empty houses)
Directed and written by: KIM Ki-Duk

Sensuality. Beauty. Attraction. Silence. Communication. Force. Change. Choice. LIFE. Two. Three.

These are the words that I choose to use for the description of this movie. Because in my opinion they express best both the form and the content of the movie.


HE, Tae-suk, is a loner that doesn’t seem to have any occupation, doesn’t seem to have any “earthly” concern, doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular. Everything he does is break into houses when their habitants are away and live there for a few days in their shadows, without stealing or destroying anything. His whole simple existence changes suddenly whn in one of the houses he meets HER, Sun-hwa, a beautiful woman living in an unhappy marriage with an abusive husband. After HE rescues HER, they both leave and continue breaking into houses and living the same way as he used to. In time the relationship between the two evolves, falling in love with each other, growing in complexity and intensity until when they are separated by a specific life experience that will make HIM learn how to become almost invisible.

When I watched the movie, the subtitle translated the title to “Menage a trois”, creating some sort of wrongful expectations.

The first impressions after watching the movie made me consider it as being exaggerated, over the top, because of some ideas (like the one regarding “invisibility”) and believe that the movie expresses very well the idea that if a woman wants to cheat on her husband, she will do it even if he holds her hand. And the scene in the end of the movie totally supports this idea. So, as soon as the movie ended, the male (or misogynistic) in me made me see the “cheating woman” as the central part of the movie.

But then I thought a bit more about it and started seeing the beautiful things in it:
Sensuality. Beauty. Attraction. Silence. Communication. Force. Change. Choice. LIFE. Two. Three.

What I find extremely beautiful about this movie is the fact that neither of the two speak a word throughout the whole movie. Now, you shouldn’t understand that this is a mute film. No. The other characters speak, it’s just that THEY don’t. This technique is superb, because this way the actors really put their talent to work, being forced to express the connection and love between the two characters only by the means of gestures and mimics. When you will see the movie, you will notice how the attraction between them grows with every single gesture they make, how their love grows from one scene to the next, making this movie full of sensuality and sexuality, without having any scene of explicit nudity, without having anything vulgar in it. If I was to compare this movie from this point of view, the first movie that comes to my mind is “Cruel intentions” (first part, obviously), because it’s only there that I had seen the idea of sexuality so well expressed, without any explicit sexual content.

The experiences that THEY go through along the movie while they are together are so carefully chosen and constructed that you can easily see the way they change, how they get closer and closer to each other, how HE starts to understand that there are consequences to everything he does and you want to see what they will do next.

Another superb element is the scene close to the end when SHE says her only line in the movie, scene depicted in the enclosed photo. Even if the scene may seem a bit taken to the extreme, it is full of emotion and great feeling.

The very last scene when they get on a weight scale and kiss also carries a great deal of symbolic load.

The quote that you can read on the last image of the movie brings for me a “matrix-like” light on the movie: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream”. In my opinion, sometimes that is the beautiful part of the world we live in: seeking the DREAM in it.

I will now leave you to discover the weight that the scale shows, which is the only line that SHE says, what is the experience that puts them apart and most of all, which is the explanation of the title of the movie. Because this movie raises more questions than the answers it gives. And those of us that will find the key to solving the problem from the end of the movie will certainly break down a lot of personal limits.

You can also watch here the trailer of the movie that features a very well chosen song from the soundtrack.

When you will have seen the movie, come back and post a comment because I would love to hear your opinion about it.

K.