A Woman After a Killer Butterfly

Among Kim Ki-young’s most unclassifiable films, A Woman After a Killer Butterfly spirals from chance encounter to metaphysical odyssey, as a suicidal man becomes entangled with a mysterious woman and a professor obsessed with death, insects, and ancient tombs. Genre and tone mutate restlessly: noir drifts into horror, eroticism into absurdism, philosophy into pulp. Kim’s wild visual imagination—extreme close-ups, symbolic props, and disorienting shifts in space—renders interior states with feverish intensity. Frequently cited as a pinnacle of 1970s Korean cult cinema, the film stages mortality and desire as a delirious chase after something as fragile and dangerous as a “killer butterfly.” You don’t watch A Woman After a Killer Butterfly to follow the plot—you let it crawl into your brain and start laying eggs. Digitally mastered in 2023 by the Korean Film Archive.