Kim Ki-Duk, the greatest Korean director of his generation, brings once more his stunning artistic vision to the silver screen with his 2005 film The Bow (Korean: Hwal). As with many of his works, the film is fixated upon isolated individuals living peculiar lives, which in this case entails an old boatman that lives anchored off the coast of Korea in a fishing boat with a near-mute teenage girl who may be his captive, and is certainly fated to be his bride. The film is hard to categorize in terms of genre, but may be best expressed as a sort of “drama of an extreme”, whereby a unique, strange circumstance is given full expression over the course of the film to blossom into a story that is at once captivating and mystifying. The difficulty of categorization is only exacerbated by Kim Ki-Duk’s standard taciturn style, with a sparse script relying...