Kim Ki-Duk is a bit of a celebrity down here in Poland, especially in the art circles. This position was a bit hurt by his immense failure of a movie "Time", but memories of past glory persist. "Dream" was therefore awaited with clenched fists and some drool pouring from the mouths of critics."Dream" tells a story of two people - a man and a woman - whose lives become intertwined by a weird twist of fate. Apparently when they both sleep the man dreams, whilst the women ends up sleepwalking and executing the dream. When this reality folds they unwillingly start connecting their lives together - they attempt various schemes to solve the issue - with more or less limited results. Will they be able to stop the dreams? Will the dreams connect them eternally or destroy them? The movie itself fails to make any such impression asthe director's glorious predecessors, but thankfully it is watchable, if extremely flawed. To a large part the movie is even enjoyable, thanks to it's slightly slapsticky humour focused on methods of trying not to fall asleep. In the meantime issues of love, solitude, connection are hardly dealt with or are subtly touched. That is until the final third, when the movie increasingly and unsuccessfully goes into "Old Boy" territory plus some cheesy Korean love flick. The romance doesn't work and isn't believable, while the grand finale instead of being somber and melancholic ends up being laughable and... cheesy.Definitely not the corn on the cob any fan of Kim Ki Duk was expecting. But I least several times I had a good honest laugh (as intended hopefully by the director, although I wasn't always sure). The problem remains however the impossibility to turn a blind eye on the slightly ridiculous last 30 minutes, even more so due to the fact that it was so out of focus from the less serious start to it.And not even the beautiful cinematography can help with this movie playing out like a Brazilian soap with a supernatural twist to it...

The Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly and when he woke up he thought maybe he now was a man in a butterfly's dream. I think you can see the whole film as a dream and as such it is just perfect. In the real world it's of course impossible for a Japanese to be understood in Corea, speaking his own tongue -it's not like e.g. a Swedish actor in a Norwegian or Danish film- but in a dream it's even natural. Also, the "comical", bloody stay-awake-scenes should be seen as dream-scenes; I guess in real life you would drink a lot of coffee instead of stabbing yourself! So, my recommendation is: give the film a second chance and look upon it as a dream.

In this unusual and slightly ominous romantic fantasy from Korea, Joe Odagiri stars as Jin, a young man who experiences a foreboding nightmare about a traffic accident and feels compelled, upon waking, to travel to the same spot he visited in the dream. As it turns out, a hit-and-run accident indeed occurred there; curious, Jin tails the police to the home of the suspect - a beautiful young woman named Ran (Lee Na-Young) who vehemently denies involvement and cites, as an alibi, the fact that she slept the entire night. Jin relays the specifics of his dream to the cops and insists that they arrest him; they dismiss him as a crank and arrest Ran instead, but in time the young man and woman discover a bizarre pattern: when he dreams of specific events, she acts out those events in real life.

A man and a woman's life becomes entangled as she does what he dreams, or in other cases,he experiences what she does while sleepwalking. Its a storyline that Kim-Duk should feel right at home with. And for the first twenty five minutes or so it looks promising. Rich atmosphere with tasteful use of music. I was just waiting for him to really start WORKING with the story and ideas at hand.I don't think he does that. To me it looks like Kim-Duks abandons much of his graceful soul-searching in favor of fleshy melodrama. Especially the awkward shouting-scene at the field, but the whole film has something contrived about it. The main-character are very illogical in their thinking, with may indicate that the film is meant to work on a allegorical level, but I'm dubious. The cinematography too strikes me as bland, with some interesting exceptions. There are faint echoes of 3-Iron here, the film that more and more stands out as his masterpiece, but lacks most of its subtle grace.Well, until the end that is. The breathtaking and magical scene where she "escapes" confirms that Kim-Duk still has it in him,(but I'm not wild about how it ties everythinkg together so neatly), as much as i respect him as an artist, i think Kim-Duk needs to relocate and form ranks.