A while ago I saw another one of those weird movies, The Isle (Seom, 2000), a Korean, psychological horror flick by Kim Ki-duk. The setting is a poetically ethereal lake, a remote fishing resort with small floating cottages on the water. A mute Hee-jin ferries her customers back and forth, providing them with baits, supplies, hookers, and occasional sexual favors of her own. It certainly helps that she vaguely reminds me of my ex Paula (but I guess you’re tired of hearing me say that by now – and rightly so). The lyrical serenity of the scenery offers a stark contrast with the psychological and physical horrors that ensue. Hee-jin exhibits some kind of extreme bipolarism, showing dispassionate acts of kindness one moment, and demonstrating acts of gruesome cruelty the next. She slowly becomes intrigued with one of her customers, who’s suicidally depressed and on the run for the law. She saves his live one time, refuses his violent advances, calls in a girl for him, but then grows a passionate jealousy for the hooker. Eventually, Hee-jin ties the girl up and tows in her one of the floats to the farthest side of the lake. In her attempt to catch someone’s attention, the girl accidentally drowns in the water later.
Like the scenery, the iridescent cinematography contrasts severely with the torturous brutality appearing right in front of us. Acts of animal cruelty are depicted in the same unmoving stillness as scenes of rape, mutilation, attempted suicide and murder. The most excruciatingly troubling moments involve two complementary attempted suicides. In the first, Hee-jin’s lover swallows half a dozen fishhooks and has to be saved from the water by Hee-jin pulling the fishing line that’s stuck in his throat. She carefully pulls out the fishhooks, and then has sex with him to distract him from the bleeding pain. When the guy later tries to leave her, she imitates him, by inserting fishhooks into her vagina and falling in the water. She, too, needs to be towed out of the water by the fishing line caught inside her, and then the guy has to carefully remove the hooks while blood flows all over the float. The film ends enigmatically, after police officers discover the body of the hooker and her pimp, who Hee-jin had killed. She takes off with the guy on his float and they hide out in a patch of reeds...
The gory aesthetics of The Isle work on many different levels. The gruesome cruelty reveals primal instincts of basic human and animal emotions. Human relations are no more than fish caught in bait and eaten raw. It’s an allegory of extremes, like the serenity contrasting with the horror, where the shore and the floats represent life and death, love and hate, where sex can be as meaningless as eating fish or releasing oneself, or be as passionately primal as the struggle for life, the all devouring desire for connectedness in a remote lake of isolated isles between misty mountains. The poetics may be violent, but they serve a distinct purpose. The image of a dangling fish recalls the miniature of a hanging man that Hee-Jin’s lover made out of wire, which itself recalls Hee-jin enjoying her swing in front of her store overlooking the lake. Such intricate imagery makes this film a quietly disturbing, but delicately profound contemplation. If you have the stomach, you might enjoy The Isle, too.
Like the scenery, the iridescent cinematography contrasts severely with the torturous brutality appearing right in front of us. Acts of animal cruelty are depicted in the same unmoving stillness as scenes of rape, mutilation, attempted suicide and murder. The most excruciatingly troubling moments involve two complementary attempted suicides. In the first, Hee-jin’s lover swallows half a dozen fishhooks and has to be saved from the water by Hee-jin pulling the fishing line that’s stuck in his throat. She carefully pulls out the fishhooks, and then has sex with him to distract him from the bleeding pain. When the guy later tries to leave her, she imitates him, by inserting fishhooks into her vagina and falling in the water. She, too, needs to be towed out of the water by the fishing line caught inside her, and then the guy has to carefully remove the hooks while blood flows all over the float. The film ends enigmatically, after police officers discover the body of the hooker and her pimp, who Hee-jin had killed. She takes off with the guy on his float and they hide out in a patch of reeds...The gory aesthetics of The Isle work on many different levels. The gruesome cruelty reveals primal instincts of basic human and animal emotions. Human relations are no more than fish caught in bait and eaten raw. It’s an allegory of extremes, like the serenity contrasting with the horror, where the shore and the floats represent life and death, love and hate, where sex can be as meaningless as eating fish or releasing oneself, or be as passionately primal as the struggle for life, the all devouring desire for connectedness in a remote lake of isolated isles between misty mountains. The poetics may be violent, but they serve a distinct purpose. The image of a dangling fish recalls the miniature of a hanging man that Hee-Jin’s lover made out of wire, which itself recalls Hee-jin enjoying her swing in front of her store overlooking the lake. Such intricate imagery makes this film a quietly disturbing, but delicately profound contemplation. If you have the stomach, you might enjoy The Isle, too. 
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