3-Iron

Tae-suk makes his way through the city on a motorbike, hanging advertising flyers on door handles. The flyers tell him which homes have been left empty, and when he finds one whose owners are away, he moves in for a few days. He takes nothing, but cooks, washes clothes and repairs whatever is broken before moving on. His routine is interrupted when he enters a large house and finds Sun-hwa, a former model trapped in a violent marriage. She leaves with him, and the two drift together from one vacant home to the next, speaking hardly at all, until the outside world catches up with them.

Kim Ki-duk directed, wrote and produced this Korean-Japanese co-production, the seventh of the thirteen features he directed, between Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and The Bow. Jae Hee plays Tae-suk and Lee Seung-yun plays Sun-hwa, with Kwon Hyuk-ho, Ju Jin-mo, Jeong-ho Choi and Ju-seok Lee among a credited cast of thirty-one. The film runs eighty-eight minutes.

Made for about one million dollars, it took roughly three times that amount worldwide, a solid return on a small production. On IMDb it holds 7.9 out of 10 from around 61,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.8 from about 1,300, showing broad audience approval; critics, at 7.6 from ninety-three reviews, were slightly more reserved but still positive.