Rating: 4/5
Hooptober XII | 1/31 | Decades 1/9 | 1970s | Zombie 1/5
While out catching butterflies with Moon-oh and friends, Kim Yeong-geol stumbles across a woman by the river. When Yeong-geol injects a caught butterfly with a solution to kill it, the woman accosts Yeong-geol, and the two argue over the nobility of death. They share some Fanta that the woman brought with her, only for her to reveal that she had poisoned the Fanta. Though Yeong-geol survives the poisoning, the woman dies. Later, at the police station, Detective Park rules the woman’s death a suicide and lets Yeong-geol go, giving him a necklace the woman wore, which features a jeweled butterfly.
Yeong-geol discovers that the poison gives him suicidal thoughts. On his way home, he encounters a mysterious older man selling a book about using willpower to prevent death. The older man keeps pestering Yeong-geol, stopping Yeong-geol from killing himself, to Yeong-geol’s chagrin. In frustration, Yeong-geol tries to kill the man, first by stabbing him, then by burying him, and finally by setting him on fire. Through all of it, though the older man’s body dies, his will still lives within him. Finally, Yeong-geol relents to learn about will, and the older man turns to ashes. Yeong-geol brings the ashes to the police to confess to murder, but Detective Park assures Yeong-geol that the ashes are just dirt and that he must have had a hallucination fueled by the poison.
So, Yeong-geol tries to live his life, going on a cave expedition with Moon-oh. In the cave, they find the skeleton of a woman. They decide to sell the skeleton. Moon-oh leaves the skeleton with Yeong-geol so that Moon-oh can speak with an expert, Professor Lee, who specializes in collecting old skeletons. While reassembling the skeleton, rain leaks through Yeong-geol’s roof, bringing the skeleton back to life. The woman died 2000 years ago, fasting for 30 days per a shaman’s instructions so that when she awakens, she will meet a good man. She must also eat a raw human liver in 10 days or she will die. Yeong-geol tries to find her a liver but is unable, so the woman decides to take Yeong-geol’s instead. However, after spending 10 days together, she has fallen in love with him and spares his life, losing her own in the process.
Yes, all this happens in the first act of the movie. The rest of the movie’s plot unfolds when Yeong-geol secures a job working for Professor Lee and meets the professor’s daughter, Kyeong-mi, who also wears a jeweled butterfly necklace. What is her connection to the woman by the river? What does this fateful meeting mean for Yeong-geol? Will he find the will to live?
Like many East Asian films from this period, the film eludes a straightforward summary or genre classification. It has a folktale vibe, where Yeong-geol goes through a sequential series of events with no overarching plot. Think Don Quixote. Thematically, the movie explores death—those who crave it, those who avoid it. And I guess how women are the worst?
The cinematography is quite good — it’s fluid, and the compositions effectively convey the power dynamics at play. The colors are pretty nice, thanks to smart and dramatic lighting that gives each scene an unworldly quality. It all has a playful quality that I find difficult to take seriously, but judging by the movie’s wild tone shifts, I’m not sure how seriously I’m supposed to take it at times.
Overall, it’s challenging to analyze the movie without discussing all its details, but I want to leave you with discoveries of your own. It’s not that the film is difficult to understand— it just doesn’t fit neatly into a box. Believe it or not, it all comes together in the end — the opening series of motifs recapitulated through the Kyeong-mi melodrama.
** Stray Thoughts / Spoilers **
- The poison woman has a sick retro Fanta glass bottle.
- The mysterious old man keeps saying, “Triumph of the Will,” but I don’t think he’s referring to Hitler. I could be wrong, though.
- Yeong-geol only seems to play harmonica just before he makes a move to end his life.
- TIL about the Silla Dynasty, which existed from 57 BCE - 935 CE, which is the time during which the skeleton woman lived.
- Yeong-geol buys an automated cake maker to earn some extra dough (ha!). He and the skeleton woman have sex on top of a pile of them as the cake maker keeps shooting them off.
- Kim Ja-ok, who plays Kyeong-mi, was in a bunch of K-dramas later in life. I wonder if she’s a recognizable name to any contemporary K-drama fans?
- The film becomes more overtly horror about an hour in, when there’s a subplot about Professor Lee receiving mysterious packages with skulls — for every skull he receives, a headless corpse is discovered. Every victim is someone Lee studied for their Mongolian traits.
- Impressive how the incinerator can burn up all the bones except for the skull.
- The movie becomes a beach movie about 80 minutes in for about 10 minutes.
- Yeong-geol talks about masterpieces and how artists can’t die without one great piece, which motivates Kyeong-mi. Her great work is to capture Yeong-geol and die alongside him. In her words, this is the most significant expression of love. Yeong-geol becomes a butterfly in others’ nets. ** END Stray Thoughts / Spoilers **