Bad Guy created quite a degree of controversy when it came out with its story of a woman degraded and forced into a life of prostitution and how she eventually comes to love the man who placed here there. Indeed the story is really a variant on the Roman myth of The Rape of the Sabine Women about a group of women who in the end came to love a village of men that forcibly abducted them. Kim seems to have also drawn quite a degree of inspiration from The Collector (1965) – both films concern a girl who is an art student and a man who comes from a whole different (lower) socio-economic background who becomes obsessed with and then abducts and imprisons her in an effort to make her love him.

Kim begins the film with a captivating scene that starkly pinpoints the sense of two characters on diametrically opposed sides of the social fence. He makes the sharp contrast between the lovely Seo Won sitting on a public bench, staring into space, looking the embodiment of sunny innocence, and Cho Je-Hyun’s harsh face blankly staring at her. This contrast abruptly explodes into action as he forcibly tries to kiss her and has to be held off by cops, and even as he is held off continues to stand there saying nothing, staring at her like a wild animal. Cho never speaks throughout the entire film (up until one line at the end where we learn exactly why he doesn’t speak) and his performance is a remarkable one that is given entirely through wild, intensive stares, or through explosions of violence (his frustration is never better communicated than in the very next scene after the above where we see him punch his fist through a glass window in mute frustration). Kim puts the contrasts in the opening scene through even further twists as we see Cho stalking Seo around the city, and then the set-up where she picks up the wallet and is forced by the businessman to pay it back and is then sold into prostitution.

This is about the point where Bad Guy could have become a truly sordid film. Someone like Takashi Miike, to whom Kim is sometimes compared, would have had a veritable field day with the material. Kim does show a number of scenes with Seo being raped and abused, but largely the film does not dwell on her degradation. Kim seems not so much interested in rubbing audiences faces in it, as Miike might do, but quite contrarily he creates a film that is often extraordinarily tender. The initial brutalities that we see are soon contrasted with remarkably gentle images like Cho coming into the room to touch Seo’s face as she sleeps or stopping to fix a faulty hook on the wall, of their two faces placed against one another through the one-way mirror. Kim fills the whole film with strikingly poetic moments that captivate without words. There seems no more hopeless a reinforcement of Seo’s realization that she is property than when she does manage to escape and as she walks along the street an anonymous woman comes and casually places a jacket around her shoulders and just as quickly disappears, and no more stark a view of the hopelessness of her situation than when Cho takes her to the beach and they sit and watch a wordless vignette as a woman in a red dress gets up and walks out into the ocean. There is perhaps a little too much drama involving the rival gang and Cho’s imprisonment in the latter half but the relationship that grows is quite heartfelt and beautifully played by the two actors.

This does bring one to the ending, which is both quite haunting and head-scratchingly peculiar. [PLOT SPOILERS]. Here Cho finally lets Seo go and she departs with tears in her eyes. He is then seemingly stabbed by one of his own gang and left bleeding to death on the riverbank but then gets up apparently unharmed. She meanwhile is picked up along the highway by a truck driver and services him. And then in a really puzzling twist, she buys a red dress identical to the one worn by the woman we saw earlier, puts it on and returns to the beach where she digs up the remaining pieces of the torn photos that were buried in the sand to find that the faces of the man and woman in the photos are herself and Cho. Quite what this surreal piece of synchronicity means is a puzzle – are we meant to regard it or the earlier scene or indeed the whole of this epilogue as a dream? That said, the peculiarity of it – and particularly seeing such a surreal effect in a film that is otherwise quite mundane – is quite haunting. Even more so is the final scenes where she and Cho are reunited, he outfits a truck with a mattress in the back and they travel around the countryside, stopping at the seaside so that he can rent her out to fishermen and then in the final fadeout continue on. Kim’s ending the film on such an off-centre note is both remarkable and disturbing.