Samaria (Samaritan Girl) poster & wallpaper

Eol Lee, Gul-seon Kim, Im Gyun-Ho

To fulfill their dreams of traveling to Europe, two teenage girls Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) and Jae-young (Min-jeog Seo) start a prostitution business. Yeo-jin handles the business side, while Jae-young "...( read more  read more... )entertains" the customers. When Jae-young is accidentally killed during a police raid, Yeo-jin locates their clients in an act of penance, sleeping with them to return their money. Yeo-jin's father (Eol Lee) stumbles onto her secret and takes revenge on her lovers. At a crossroads, father and daughter embark on a desperate trip in the hope of gaining absolution and redemption.

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77% liked it

5,019 ratings

Critics

50% liked it

8 critics

R, 1 hr. 35 min.

Directed by: Ki-duk Kim

Release Date: February 10, 2004

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DVD Release Date: May 10, 2005

Stats: 241 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (241)

  • 76Majikat
    August 27, 2009
    76Majikat
    Quite an unusual and interesting storyline, one that starts in a direction and ends up in a completely opposite direction.

    A very watchable film, but also quite easily forgettable.
  • Jungian
    September 9, 2008
    Jungian
    I have mixed feelings on this film from Kim Ki-Duk that comes off as just poorly plotted and muddled. overall enjoyable film on the oddities and ignorance of childhood and the helplessness of parenthood.
  • sitenoise
    May 29, 2008
    sitenoise
    About a girl whose father discovers she is prostituting herself ... OR ... a movie about a guy who discovers his daughter is prostituting herself. Either way, this is a very touching film ... from Kim Ki-Duk. There are two different worlds going on trying to find bridge through p...( read more)ain or kindness. For those who think it starts off like an after school special, yep, that's the point. I think this is KKD in top form. Sex, Violence, Misunderstanding, Love comingling in bizarro-land.
  • JeT0425
    March 8, 2008
    JeT0425
    Samaria [Samaritan Girl] (2004)
    director: Kim Ki-duk
    starring: Kwak Ji-Min, Yeo-reum Han, Eol Lee

    Review coming soon .
  • EarthlyAlien
    February 24, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.

    ...( read more)er="0" alt="Photobucket">

    There are no shades of grey in Kim Ki-duk's world, it's a black and white world of good and evil, although the two extremes are often difficult to separate. Films like The Isle and Bad Guy, in his early career, were violent and disturbing works, shocking and often sordid psycho-sexual melodramas.

    The genius of this man doesn't lie there, but in the fact that he would, just a couple of years after that, shock and suprise everyone who called him a misogynist, by making two of the most poetic and visually arresting films of the 21st century: the very restrained and silent Buddhist fable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and then, a year later, the phantasmal and melancholy love story 3-Iron. There was violence in these films too but that remained mostly in background and was always shown in an oblique and artistically mature manner. Samaria - Silver Bear winner at the '04 Berlin Film Festival - continues the same tradition of those two films, although it somehow adds a certain amount of his early career's rawness. It's a film that moves and affects you one minute, only to utterly shock you the next.

    As embodied in the child Buddhist monk in Spring..., for Kim even innocence holds innate the seeds of corruption. In Samaria, the innocence is that of two young beautiful schoolgirls, Yeo-jin and Jae-young. In order to save money to escape to Europe, the two best friends resort to prostitution, luring clients on the internet who are in no doubt about their underage status. Similarly to Spring..., the film is divided into three distinct segments:

    The first, "Vasumitra", starts with one of girls reciting the mythical story of an Indian prostitute of the same name, whose clients turned devout Buddhist after having sex with her. The film then goes on to make a violent mockery of this naive and sentimental belief in the nurturing and spiritual potential of sexuality, as we see Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) 'managing' the 'transactions', procuring the clients and keeping look-out for police while Jae-young (Min-jeong Seo) has sex with her middle-age clients in downtown motels. The events come to tragic conclusion when Jae-young jumps off from a window and dies following a surprise police raid.

    In the second part, "Samaria", which gives the film its title - essentially a metaphor, a bizarre, yet brilliant perversion of the Christian myth of "the good Samaritan" - Yeo-jin decides to atone for her sins, to make-up for what has happened to her friend and undo the harm that has been done. She goes back through each one of the clients, sleeping with them and paying them back the money they had been saving. The courage of her gesture moves these men to reconsider the evil of their actions, hence the Samaritan metaphor. The situation gets complex when the girl's father, a police detective who is still recovering from his wife's death, comes to know about the sordid degradation that his daughter is subjecting herself to. He becomes obsessed and starts stalking the men and finally murders one of them in a typically brutal manner.

    Finally, the third - and most beautiful - segment, "Sonata", tries to tie everything together. The father and daughter go on an idyllic vacation through the countryside to visit her mother's grave, and try to confront their own inner demons without telling each other anything. The film ends bafflingly when the father, after giving his daughter preliminary driving lessons, leaves her alone and surrenders himself to the police. But only after he has seen his daughter crying silently in the night, and thus making sure of her essential virtuousness.

    The film itself, as you can gather from the above, works not so much on a realistic and plausibility level but more in a metaphoric and thought provoking way, even though the film itself uses realism in its storytelling to convey unfolding events. The camera mainly stays handheld, which gives the film an intensity and the feel that you are never quite sure what will happen next, which is especially evident during the middle part of the film where we begin to follow the father. The film also uses natural sound which, along with Kim's usually gorgeous cinematography, makes it another feast for the eyes.

    The acting is also exceptional, not least by the father, played by Eol Lee, whose pain we can feel just by his facial expression throughout. Starting out as the loving single parent, his journey takes him through the darkest days of parenthood as he watches his daughter grow up in the most alarming of ways. The two girls also put in strong performances, especially Ji-min Kwak, the "samaritan girl". Given more speaking opportunities that we would normally expect in a Kim Ki-duk film (in 3-Iron for example, neither of the main characters actually speaks) it is refreshing to see that he changes around this formula and is not typecast by the unique skill he has for telling a story in images alone.

    Again, Kim Ki-duk (who's a Catholic himself) tries to overlap Buddhist teaching with Catholic dogma and the two completely fail to blend, giving out contradictory messages. Jae-young identifies with an Indian holy prostitute who brings men closer to God by having sex with them. Yeo-jin, on the other hand, likes to hear her father's stories of saints and miracles and comes to believe that her actions by sleeping with the men will redeem the wrongs that have been done. There are few directors who so vigorously cling to certain themes and explore them through different situations as Kim does in his films.

    Samaria has both a depressing and pessimistic feeling towards human nature and this refreshing sense of hope, combined with an astute eye for social detail (13 and 14 year-old girls having sex like they're adults) and aesthetic composition. This is one of the most profoundly moving and strangely transcendent tales of guilt, original sin and innocence lost in recent cinema. In one of its many metaphoric images of intruded-upon (and violated) landscape, in the film's final shot, the errant sight of a wobbling, out of control car struggling to chase a sports utility vehicle through a flooded gravel road in the rural countryside, doggedly navigating the inhospitable terrain using an innate compass that elusively, but transfixedly, points home. A beautiful, beautiful film.
  • malefius
    October 11, 2009
    malefius
    A moral story in which prostitution and guilt are seen in a poetical way. Dialogues are secondary and the visuals become the main plot.

    Mi primera película de Kim Ki-duk. Aunque tiene un toque medio moralino, es una historia algo fuerte pero contada con un sentido contemplativo ...( read more)y poético. Sin embargo no tiene mucho en especial que ofrecer.
  • LickTheABCs
    August 9, 2009
    LickTheABCs
    Seriously, dude. Get a frickin' puppy already. Ok, now that I've got that out of the way, here we have my personal favorite Ki-duk flick.. a truly depressing story, well, about the special bond between father and daughter.. er, no it's not sorry. A story about a girl, her pimp an...( read more)d.. ya know, trying to sum up this flick in a sentence is harder than me after an episode of Hannah Montana (wow, that joke wasn't funny, in fact I think I just threw up in my mouth, lil' bit).. This review has definitely run its course. Rent this, it is a terrific film. End.
  • mvieaddict
    July 17, 2009
    mvieaddict
    Director Kim Ki-Duk gave us an insight about teenage prostitution in Korea with Samaria,but for me this was not a film about prostitution, I found that the film was more about emotionally relationships, between friends and family. The film was basically set into two parts. Part o...( read more)ne was about Jae-Young, a teenage prostitute and her best friend Yeo-Jin. The second part was about Yeo-Jin and her father. Each part had its tense moments, and the director, pretty much did a good job telling the story and showing the audience: tragedy and closeness. There was not sex or violence like other typical prostitution movies, it was more used as a medium to get the point.
    The ending was kind of confusing.
  • arashxak
    December 15, 2008
    arashxak
    Ki-duk Kim's movies are magical, Impressive & filled with symbols & metaphors & this one is no exception

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