The movie's three main acts nicely shows seamless focus shift from Yeo Jin to her father and to their relationship. Yet the whole story is filled with indecisiveness that lets all the sub-stories to have no definitive end. Strangely for me, with only standard run time of 100 minutes or so, the movie is successful in creating the impression that it was longer than that. Unfortunately the movie doesn't really impress me. The technicalities don't offer anything special. The story is solid enough with constant mood and flow kept all along the entire duration. But the characters' indecisiveness in the story seems weird for me. The acting overall is not so good. None of the actors show enough face expressions to express their respective roles.

In "Samaritan girl" Ki-Duk put his cinema of poetry and tragedy at the service of a young girl who wants to redeem her dead friend (who was a prostitute) giving the money back to all of her customers.As usual Ki-duk takes care of each and every sequence; his movies are just like a succession of pictures that sometimes are full of beauty and some others are full of brutality. "Samaritan girl" is less reflexive and less contemplative than "The arc" or "Spring, summer, autumn...", there are more dialogs and the plot is much more worldly.If you like the movies of this Korean director you're gonna enjoy this one, but if you haven't seen any of his works I recommend that you watch "Iron 3" or "The isle" first...*My rate: 7/10

SPOILER: READ THIS ONLY IF YOU HAVE SEEN THE FILM! "Samaritan Girl" is a brilliant and haunting film, but the double ending may be difficult for many Western non-Buddhist minds to understand. This is how I saw the ending and the motivations leading up to it: The father is the prostitute-killer, that is why he becomes psychotic when he discovers his daughter is one. He plans the trip to the wife/mother's grave, intending to kill the daughter and then turn himself in. This is exactly what he does. The second ending, when the girl wakes up again and the father has (impossibly) painted hundreds of stones yellow so she can practice driving the car, is in reality her death-dream, her transition into the bardo, and chasing her father after he has been picked up by the police is part of her letting-go.

For some reason Korean movies has a great "hip factor" nowadays and I have some difficulties seeing the point. Today you are not supposed to object to the violence, regardless of how brutal it is. Somebody has decided that this is nerdish and that "somebody" everyone has to obey.You've probably seen worse brutality than in "Samaria", but anyway it is the violence that makes the whole thing so difficult to understand. OK, a father is out on a vigilante tour after realizing his daughter is a prostitute, although she, for certain reasons, pay her customers and not the opposite. The father's feelings are anyway not understandable. You've got no keys to them. It's not enough showing him just sorry and humiliated.The reconciliation scene in the end is however beautiful and made in an uncommon way. But it doesn't make the film more understandable. This is done too hasty. Even Korean film might be just on an average level.