3-Iron

The Korean title means “empty house.” It’s a good title, though the one in English isn’t bad, either. Tae-suk is a young man who has a nice scam going. He hangs menus on doorknobs in the morning, and later goes back to see which ones were not removed. That house is likely to be empty, which he confirms by listening to the outgoing message on the answering machine. If the residents are out of town for a vacation (and are foolish enough to say so; are all Koreans that innocent?), he moves in for a while. And he is a very good guest. He cooks and cleans and scrubs his clothes, takes selfies, makes the bed. Unless the people miss the food he ate, they would probably never know he was there. For some reason, he is deeply into hitting golf balls, always with a 3-iron.

One house he enters is not empty, but he doesn’t discover this for a while. A young woman, Sun-hwa, watches him silently, then finally reveals herself. She is bruised and battered. Her husband is a pig, and when he returns, Tae-suk batters him with golf balls. The wife leaves with the boy.

They are together for a while, until they enter an apartment where a man has died. Instead of taking it on the lam, they bathe and wrap the body in the traditional Korean way, and bury him in the garden. They are caught, the wife is returned to her husband, and the boy put in prison. There … well, here’s where it gets weird. Somehow, through some Korean mind-fuck or other, he learns to vanish in a cell not much bigger than a closet. (Or is he actually dead? I don’t know.) He gets out, returns to his loved one, and lives in the house with her, right under clueless hubby’s nose!

Allegory? Spook story? I guess you could see it any way you want to. I didn’t choose, just sat back and enjoyed it. And one of the chief reasons is something I have held back and will now reveal. The boy and the girl never speak to each other until she says “I love you,” at the very end. And the husband thinks she’s saying it to him! Tae-suk never speaks at all, in fact, not to her, not to the police who question him, not to the sadistic prison guard. If you like your films unusual, this one is for you. Otherwise, you’d best skip it.