In what might as well be a silent film, Ki-duk Kim offers up a film exploring the space between reality and unreality and the meaning of intimacy.
Hee Jae is Tae-suk, a young, homeless man, adrift on the streets of a South Korean city. He drives about, hanging restaurant flyers from doorknobs. A day or so later, he returns to the neighborhood on his motorcycle, seeking out the vacant homes that still have the flyers dangling. He quickly breaks in and makes himself at home, taking pictures of himself alongside strangers' belongings and fixing the odd broken clock, air pistol or scale. Then he is gone, like a ghost.
One day, he breaks into a house in a wealthy neighborhood. But the ghost is haunted by one of the home's residents, a young model, Sun-hwa (Seung-yeon Lee), whose photographs are visibly displayed. Overhearing an angry call on the answering machine by the woman's husband, Min-kyu (Hyuk-ho Kwon), Tae-suk learns of the unhappy marriage. But it's not until he is lying in bed one night masturbating to the images of Sun-hwa that he and the wife meet.
When Min-kyu returns home, yelling at his wife and trying to crudely seduce her, Tae-suk lures him out to the back yard. There, with a seldom-used 3-iron golf club in hand, he fires ball after ball into Min-kyu, dropping him to the ground. Tae-suk and Sun-hwa escape, with her joining him in his nomadic existence. But Min-kyu loves his wife in his own way, and after Tae-suk and Sun-hwa are arrested while living in the home of a man they found dead and buried, it becomes his turn to tee up.
Barely any dialogue is spoken throughout the film, and Tae-suk remains mute throughout. That and the Zen-like quietude with which Kim directs give the film an otherworldly quality. But the second half of the film gets mired in a clumsy plot involving Min-kyu's thirst for revenge and some brutal and corrupt police. Kim tries to redeem himself toward the end, and there is some question as to whether Tae-suk survives his ordeals or whether he has truly become a ghost, visible only to those who love him.
Jae and Lee deliver stoic performances, with Lee nearly becoming sublime at the end. But both Kim and Kwon are to be congratulated for not being lazy and making Min-kyu an irredeemable ogre. Min-kyu is frustrated in his love for Sun-hwa, but can only offer her prose when Tae-suk is the poetry she desires.