Ok, so if you jaded movie fans feel like watching something truly out of the ordinary, I can highly recommend ‘A Woman After a Killer Butterfly’ (Kim Ki-young, 1978), currently streaming on youtube with English subs thanks to the Korean Film Archive.

Rather than the random, culture clash style weirdness one tends to associate with Asian movies, this is actually a very smart, well made, internationally informed film that just happens to be… completely inexplicable. Seriously, you can *never* guess where this thing going to go next…. in the second half it kind of settles down (in a manner of speaking) into sort of a crazed gothic melodrama with a sub-plot about a secret society who dress up as butterflies to desecrate graves and send severed heads to a renowned archaeologist (or something!?), but the episodic weirdness of the first half just left me stunned. 

It’s a certain sense, the very weirdness that makes it so remarkable to jerks like me kind of works against it… essentially the film is kind of a classic tragedy that tries to tackle some weighty cosmic issues of life and death and rebirth etc., but after watching it all I could think was, jesus christ… the pastry machine. Weird-o-meter… overloading.

Anyway: a pretty unique piece of work, to say the least. Give it a go, brave viewers.