The Isle

Contemplating suicide, a young man rents a floating fishing house raft and considers his gun. The young woman who sells bait and coffee to fishermen supplements her income by selling herself. They seem matched in melancholic withdrawal, each isolated and adrift off the eerily fog-bound coast of a verdant, otherworldly island. But her withdrawal is more profound than his, and her obsession with him is exacerbated by her inability to communicate, to extend, to receive. The floats bobbing on the water’s surface are rented for hours, days or months, self-contained modules for living or going through the motions of living; a place to hide out from the wife, the job, the police or, less successfully, oneself. The two leads manifest a haunting eroticism, and the film is imbued in a disturbing prurience and psychosexual tension reminiscent of In the Realm of the Senses. While The Isle occasionally teeters on the edge of self-indulgent artiness, the gritty portrayals from Jung and Kim prevent that descent, directing us instead to Hee-Jin and Hyun-Shik’s descent into mutual dependence, hooking themselves to each other as their world shrinks to the size of a bright yellow house float adrift on an indifferent sea. (Korean with English subtitles)

Unfolding with the stark simplicity of an allegorical fable – albeit one with its fair share of sexual sadomasochism and self-mutilation – The Isle is one of the most genuinely shocking and provocative films to come along in quite some time. This startling film also reaffirms the South Korean cinema industry as one of the most adventurous and stimulating in the world today, in terms of both filmmaking craft, and willingness to embrace sexually bold material (also see Jang Sun-Woo's 1999 masterwork Lies). The film is like a merciless thriller in which the source of discomfort is not the typical fear of death, but rather fear of sexual intimacy; the characters in The Isle relate to each other through pain and domination. Wild-eyed mute Hee-jin operates a fishing ground where she rents out free-floating shacks on the lake to customers, one of whom is Hyun-shik, a wife-killer who has come to the isle to commit suicide. These two desperate souls enter into a twisted relationship, with the power struggle at its center clearly intended to be symbolic of male-female relationship dynamics. With his three previous films – Crocodile (1996), Wild Animals (1997), Birdcage Inn (1998) – director Kim Ki-Duk has made a specialty of dissecting the lives of social outcasts, a theme expanded in The Isle. As with other “Danger After Dark” films, we caution you that the content of of this film is rather graphic. How graphic, you ask? Hmmm. Well, let's just say you'll never look at fish-hooks the same way again. (Korean with English subtitles)