South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s most recent U.S. release, 3-Iron, is full of pretty pictures. These pictures, mostly portraits, line the walls of the homes that a young man named Tae-suk breaks into, briefly occupies, and while he’s there cleans, does the absent occupants’ wash, and fixes everything from a scale to a BB gun. Tae-suk also likes to take his own picture, with a rather nice digital camera, while standing in front of these portraits, perhaps in an attempt to crawl inside them. Well, he needn’t worry. He’s already in a very pretty picture, indeed. Every shot in 3-Iron is perfectly and beautifully composed—unfortunately there’s very little else to recommend. Kim is so clearly a skillful visual filmmaker that you want him to succeed, and he almost fools you into thinking that he does. His films almost never work, but always in different ways. The Isle’s pretty, serene camerawork flattened the shocking and grotesque melodrama that seemed to be the film’s whole point, while in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, the “Winter” sequence of histrionic martyrdom destroyed an otherwise meditative Buddhist fable. In 3-Iron Kim is just entirely out of his element.

Tae-suk has one rather neat trick tucked up under his sleeve. His day job, which apparently pays so well that it affords him said digital camera, along with a brand new BMW motorcycle, is to distribute restaurant flyers on door handles. When he returns to the marked doors, after some unspecified amount of time, those with a flier still on them are deemed currently uninhabited and therefore ripe for his brief domestic bliss. All in all it’s basically a benign trick, especially in comparison to the rather nasty trick that Kim has in store for the audience. For the first few scenes, as we follow Tae-suk’s rituals, we believe we’re settling into a fairly realistic art film intent on, perhaps, telling us something about alienation and the need for a home foiled by our contemporary transient nature, or something along those lines. The rhythm is calm, the dialogue all but absent. Sure there are signs of some imminent rupture, like the business man in his BMW sedan who scowls with contempt at Tae-suk, but really it all just drifts by. Or it does until the piercing scream of the archetypical Submissive Abused Woman signals that we’re about to enter troubled waters.

Thinking it unoccupied, Tae-suk has broken into Sun-hwa’s home and taken up his customary residence, while she, in a rather nice switcheroo, sneaks out of her hiding place and spies on him as if she is the intruder. All goes well, as she sees that he means no harm, and, in fact, is handy with the washboard and the screwdriver, and he bathes and masturbates to pictures of her. Perhaps dissatisfied with the hypnotic pace of the film up to this point, Kim has Sun-hwa, in short order, make her presence known, breaking Tae-suk’s onanistic concentration, receive a phone call from a man with a threatening voice—clearly the responsible party for the bruises on her face—and scream. After a motorcycle escape and subsequent return—perhaps drawn back by her suffering face—Tae-suk lures her out of her post-scream bath by laying out a girlish pink outfit on the tile floor for her and playing a CD of insufferably melodramatic pop.

Then he shows up, the scowling man from the BMW, coming home to alternately slap poor Sun-hwa in the face and coo into her ear such delightful entreaties as “Do you think of me as an insect? Are you afraid I’ll devour you?” Of course, the 3-iron golf club of the title has to make an appearance at some point, and so it does, in Tae-suk’s hands, driving golf balls into a practice target in the back yard. This clearly enrages the abusive husband and leads him right into Tae-suk’s trap. Once there, the man faces his rival’s mean golf swing, getting pelted by expert shots in his stomach, his shoulder, his groin—one even so perfectly aimed that it knocks the cell phone right out of his hand before he can call the police. At this point, two questions come to mind. First, how did this transient kid get so great at golf? And then, what the fuck happened to the movie I was watching?

Well, that movie does come back for some long, pleasant stretches, with Sun-hwa following Tae-suk in his breaking and inhabiting patterns and mimicking his domestic services as they slowly come together in a silent understanding—neither one of them says a word to each other or anyone else. Then there are the scenes of a death by errant golf ball, of a mean and unscrupulous cop with a violent streak (who, yes, eventually gets the golf ball treatment), and of the return of the abusive husband, overacting like a silent-film villain—and none of these, sadly, are played for laughs. Maddeningly, all of this is shown in one beautiful shot after another, including one that is among the most romantic I’ve ever seen, with the couple in a medium-long tableau vivant, sitting on a couch at a table, motionless except for Sun-hwa’s naked foot slowly inching up Tae-suk’s leg. The problem is that Kim has nothing to back up these perfect images, no narrative or philosophical depth with which to contextualize them. Instead, Kim borrows slapdash elements from other East Asian auteurs whose films effortlessly carry the kind of meaning he wishes upon his own; he grabs glad-handedly the mute apartment squatters from Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour, the cleaning then disappearing acts from Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Expiress, and Fallen Angels, and, from both, the attempts of people to come together in the face of a near permanent disconnection. But absent from 3-Iron is anything that allows the audience to make any kind of connection with these alienated souls.

There is nothing to know about Tae-suk other than his habits, his motorcycle, and his fondness for golf. Sun-hwa is even less substantial, a doe-eyed collection of clichés that leave us with just a pretty girl who suffered at the hands of a bastard—who in turn is so preposterously one-note that it takes effort to find him horrible rather than laughable. Other than that they exist in such a hermetically sealed world that any type of societal commentary doesn’t have a chance of getting in. This isolation from the rest of the world is a sort of specialty of Kim Ki-duk’s, but while it made sense in the sylvan lakes of The Isle and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, in the urban South Korea of 3-Iron, it just seems horribly limiting and plainly off. Even more askew is the too little, too late magical-realism lite of the final act, making the rest of the movie even more incompatible. Perhaps sensing this, Kim ends the movie with an epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream.” It sounds more like an excuse to me.

read James Crawford's take on 3-iron