A gloomy man wanders the wintry eastern sea coast bearing the ashes of his wife. She had come from northern Korea, he feels somehow compelled to scatter her remains somewhere in the North despite the division of the nations and their heavily fortified border. On his journey he will encounter three women all seemingly marked by the shadow of his wife’s death.

This complex, beautiful film is Lee’s most accomplished literary adaptation, transforming the uncanny fiction of Lee Je-ha into a visually haunting classic. Lee Bo-hee plays the wife, in flashbacks, then reappears as a prostitute and also a nurse taking a dying old man on his own impossible trajectory North. A very Korean – therefore universal – story.