First of all maybe the most important information for those who haven't seen anything from Kim Ki-duk: This is definitely not the best film from him, instead of wathing this and decide about his qualities, please check for example Bad Guy, The Isle, Samaritan Girl, 3 Iron, or the latest Time. Actually I wanted to suggest my favourite films from Ki-duk, and it seems almost all of his are better than Breath. Your next question is: "Why?"
Look at the opening situation: Entering a prison in some South Korean metropolis' suburb. A convicted is scratching the wall with a toothbrush. Jang-jin grabs the tool and stabs himself on the neck. Suicide attempt committed by a condemned? Perfect Ki-dukian origo, especially when we meet a freakish sculptor woman with an unfaithful husband, who one cold morning decides to visit Jang-jin, who has been transported back to the prison from the hospital. She wants to cheer up the prisoner who is waiting for his execution. Now my question's turn: "Why?"
A possible answer would satisfies a narrative type of question, but known Ki-duk's interests we can assume this is not the right way to approach the "story" (it's coming out early that the woman was a former girlfriend of Jang-jin, but as a weak motivation points out immediately the unimportance of this meaning-searching). By the way, cheer up a condemned: that's the really horseplay, especially if it used for saving her own sunk family. Ki-duk opens up his well used kitschy narrative and visual elements to some absurd registers (the woman installs colorful wallpapers on the prison's wall and sings some song meant to be happy (actually listening to those I wanted to commit suicide...)), to earn some strange, baffling emotional mixture.
That's why we like the director, but not this time: maybe the biggest problem is that the story doesn't make any progress. I mean progress in a way how the earlier mentioned movies did. Maybe it's my mistake (I believe that Ki-duk's movies are very dependent on your actual mood, situation, context, feelings), but this time somehow the effect didn't work as it used to. Knowing his oeuvre I used to predict some really absurd twists in the stories, what Ki-duk even turns out through visual simplicity and astonishing banality. In Breath we have the well known layer-like visual stimuli, but the story cannot grow up to its colorful beauty.
I think I only could repeat myself. There were and will be definitely better than this, but it's still deserves six out of ten, which is only bad according to Ki-duk's genious uniqueness. (I almost whispered the word 'disappointment'.)
6/10
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