On the way to the mysterious island "Ieodo" the journalist and environmental activist Chun disappears without a trace from board a ship. An employee of the hotel chain, which organized the boat trip for promotional purposes, and a newspaper employee who worked with Chun, set off together to the isolated Korean island from which Chun came, and which is now inhabited exclusively by female divers. Superstitions and legends are widespread there, and it is said that whoever sees Ieodo is doomed to die and will fall to the water spirits.
Director Kim Ki-young was never a master of logic, but his hardly summarizable "Ieoh Island" takes the viewer into the Korean island world near Cheju Island and unfolds a mystical world full of secrets and inexplicable events. With a densely structured but well though out narrative, containing flashbacks upon flashbacks, Kim tells the intricate events and backgrounds that ultimately led to Chun's disappearance, and leads both his main characters and the audience deeper and deeper into the island world of Korea, which is isolated from the outside world.
Kim's Korean answer to "Wicker Man" is qcryptic, frustrating, and disorientatingly cobbled together cinema. But tremendously fascinating nonetheless with a singulary unusual atmosphere and story about ritualistic beliefs in modern reasoning, a film about how myths might operate in the modern world. Kim knows that by imbuing his work with a right tinge of supernaturalism and, of course, absurtity: Peppered with mystery, eroticism and disturbing images. He also includes themes of environmental destruction, fertility, superstition, and the spread of capitalism (1970s Korea experienced rapid economic growth, although governed by a right wing military dictatorship at the time).
Ieoh Island is a film with a notoriously graphic climax, even by today's standards (initially cut out of prints) with depiction of necrophilia and an impaled penis, but for most of its running time the director handles the rather bizarre content very pragmatic and without exploitation. Its an incredible feminist folklore about the masculine capitalist dream rotting out our Earth and keeping everyone sexually frustrated. It explores the realms of the sexes, placing a beleaguered male protagonist within an isolated community of women.
