Films by Kim Ki-duk are bound to ignite heated controversy, even in the context of the international film festivals at which they are generally shown. A screening of THE ISLE (1999) at the Philadelphia Film Festival I attended in 2000 began with an in-person disclaimer by the festival programmer. He stated that Kim's work would be the most graphic of all the films that were to be screened that year and advised audience members to brace themselves for the violent images that were to be presented. The programmer reminded the audience that one was allowed to leave the theater if the experience of the film became too intense. As THE ISLE unfolded, scenes of sadistic emotional and physical torture, blatant cruelty to animals, frustrating codependent sexual relationships, and humiliating subordination of women by supermacho, fascistic Korean men were abundant. I was almost compelled to take the programmer's suggestion to leave the theater when one of the film's characters swallowed a bunch of barbed hooks and was later fished out of the water. These excessive images could be said to have affected the spectator's body viscerally while forcing him or her, to quote Linda Williams, to “share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm – of the body ‘beside itself’ with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness.” The appalling ecstasies of THE ISLE went beyond the acceptable limits typical of Williams's “body genres” however. I wondered why I was being subjected to the film's senseless brutality and felt that I was being forced to share in its sadism.

To be sure, a panoply of pejoratives may be invoked when discussing Kim Ki-duk and his films: misogynistic, lurid, caricatured, gratuitous, juvenile, sociopathic, exploitative, among others. He has become infamous as the enfant terrible of Korean cinema. Films that feature unforgettable, seemingly unredeemable images of corporeal abuse, involving objects such as golf clubs and cut glass, and whose vulnerable victims include social outcasts, the poor, and impressionable teenagers may also be recalled, with descriptions of outrageous scenes from titles such as BIRDCAGE INN (1998), REAL FICTION (2000), THE BOW (2005), or PIETA (2012). Men are unpredictable, sex-obsessed ego-maniacs, while women are jealous, vindictive, and deeply insecure.