An old man ‘finds’ a baby girl and takes her to live with him on his moored, rott­ing hulk of a boat, which he hires out to fisher­men; he plans to marry her when she reaches 17, but as the fate­ful day app­roaches, a young man arr­ives as part of a fish­ing party and awak­ens in the girl both a curi­os­ity about the wider world and an aware­ness of her own nas­cent sex­ual­ity, in turn pro­vok­ing an escal­at­ing fer­oc­ity in the old man’s obsess­ion.

Kim Ki-Duk’s film is strung through with the sym­bol­ism of the bow, used as a mus­ical instru­ment, a pierc­ing weapon, and a means of tell­ing fort­unes as the girl swings and the old man shoots arrows past her: the taut­ness of the bow echoes that of their relat­ion­ship, at once dang­er­ous, sex­ually tense and beauti­ful.

De­spite min­i­mal dia­logue, the psycho­log­ical ambig­u­ities and emot­ional com­plex­it­ies are drawn with incred­ible fin­esse, and in a manner at once sus­pense­ful and touch­ing. A lyr­ical, visu­ally exquis­ite work of haunt­ing orig­in­ality.