Kim Ki-duk, one of the most original Korean directors to emerge in the 1990s, makes films that are both brutal and dreamlike. He most well-known films, such as The Isle and Address Unknown, mix visual poetry with cruel, unflinching violence. Bad Guy, his most popular film to date, ups the ante by depicting, in excruciating detail, the physical and psychological degradation of a young woman (Seo Weon) forced into prostitution by the street thug who becomes infatuated with her. The thug, Han-ki (Jo Jae-hyeon), is mute. The only language he speaks is violence, and the film seems to imply that watching Sun-hwa's transformation from ordinary student to ruined streetwalker is a twisted form of love. Kim spares nothing in his depiction of the brutality inflicted on her. Han-ki watches her endure the abuse of clients and her madame through a one-way mirror until a kind of Stockholm Syndrome develops and she comes to need him almost as much as he needs her. Bad Guy is, needless to say, a disturbing film, made all the more disturbing by Kim's refined aesthetic sense, which makes it difficult to dismiss as an exercise in transgressive naughtiness. Its images stick, and depending on the viewer, its ending can be read as either uneasily poignant or outrageously offensive.