Film Reviews

3 Iron

• Rating:
• Director: Ki-duk Kim.
• Starring: Hyun-kyoon Lee, Seung-yeon Lee, Hyuk-ho Kwon.
• Details: South Korea / 88 mins (15s).

Leaflet distributor Tae-suk (Hyun-kyoon) returns to the areas he's leafleted during the day to break into unattended houses - but not to steal. Instead the young transient showers, eats and sleeps, then performs various odd-jobs and chores to pay for the privilege. It's a quirky, humorous opening that quickly becomes more serious when Tae-suk breaks into a house and discovers the bruised and beaten Sun-hwa (Seung-yeon). After Tae-suk uses the golf club of the title to batter Sun-hwa's abusive husband, the pair take off to lead a new life. Unfortunately, director and writer Ki-duk Kim is intent on taking his offbeat on-the-road story down something of a meandering dead-end; instead of concentrating on the characters (excellently acted, using a bare minimum of dialogue), Ki-duk instead goes off at a tangent that has to do with perceptions of self and ultimately asks the audience if the characters they're watching are real, or if they're not the product of some overheated imagination. That approach asks intriguing questions of conventional filmmaking philosophies and is undeniably interesting from a technical point of view, but it distracts attention from the story itself: what promises to be a tender, delicate and complex love story gets spurned in favour of dry, clinical theory.

Review by Declan Burke