DREAM (Korea, 2008)
Directed by: Kim Ki-Duk
Starring: Joe Odagiri, Lee Na-Yeong
Jin (Joe Odagiri, ADRIFT IN TOKYO) likes to stalk his ex-girlfriend on the road late at night - or at least, he likes to dream about stalking her.  After crashing into another car and whizzing past as the victim crawls out of the wreckage, he wakes up, only to find that Ran (Lee Na-Young) is being charged with the crime he committed in his dreams.  Feeling guilty, Jin rushes to the police station to explain this simple, obvious mistake, but the cops don't quite see it his way - they've got Ran on-camera in her car doing the hit-and-run, even though she was asleep in bed herself.  Or was she?  In fairly short order, Jin and Ran realize that his dreams are bleeding into her sleepwalking actions in a peculiarly perverse way: As Jin dreams of his lady love, Ran acts out his tender feelings against her own ex, who she claims to despise.  Awk-ward!

Thoroughly put out by the inconvenience, Jin and Ran attempt to sleep in shifts to avoid further troublesome episodes, resorting to taping their eyes open and smacking themselves around, but this being a Kim Ki-Duk picture, things quickly go south.  Soon, an insidious link between the dreamers' lost loves becomes clear, and as Jin's seething, bestial subconscious comes to bear against the helpless Ran's surface consciousness, insomniac desperation sets in, leading to Bergman-style role reversal, pins being driven into flesh, claw hammers, handcuffs, boxcutters, and finally, murder.

South Korean maestro Kim Ki-Duk is an international superstar, with films such as THE ISLE and SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...AND SPRING receiving worldwide honors.  Known for his unearthly visuals and twisted narratives, he delivers on his reputation in spades with DREAM, an international production featuring uberstar Joe Odagiri in a role that requires him to get way ugly, way fast, without fear.  A mind-bender of the highest order, DREAM opens like a stock Asian thriller, heavy on exposition, but quickly turns in on itself, disappearing down its own crazy shadow into a world of nightmares, memories and delusions, defying conventional genre expectations and confounding our sense of structure at every turn.  There's two answers for virtually everything you see in the last hour, and absolutely no way out as Jin and Ran spiral downward.  Like all of Kim's work, DREAM is exquisitely shot; Ran's home starts out as an overstuffed, candy-colored costume shop, and turns into a bloodstained madhouse by the climax.  His vision of the film's recurring motif, the winter butterfly, representing the schizoid dualism between dreaming and waking life, is a glittering, ethereal sprite that appears in the most unlikely of places.  Never giving the easy answer, always ready to meld beauty with body horror, Kim's DREAM is a death sentence for Jin and Ran but a divine madness for everybody else.