3-Iron

3-Iron (2004) is about a young man who enters empty homes. He is not a thief: he hangs advertising flyers on doors, returns days later, and if the flyer is still there he knows nobody is home and lets himself in. Then he lives there, does the laundry, repairs whatever is broken, and leaves. In one house he meets someone he did not expect, a woman whose husband beats her. The most unusual thing about it is the silence. The two leads barely speak across the whole film. The woman's only line comes at the end, and when she says it carries all the meaning. Kim Ki-duk wrote and directed. The Korean title means empty house; the English one comes from the golf club the man carries. It won the Silver Lion for direction at the Venice Film Festival in 2004. It runs 88 minutes. Good for: silent storytelling, unconventional love stories, and Korean cinema. Less good for: the last section leaves realism entirely and becomes a metaphor, and the film falls apart for anyone who will not accept that shift. Domestic violence is shown, and the woman's decisions are never explained.