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Here’s a riddle: how do you make a successful movie with protagonists who won’t talk? The short answer is to hire Kim Ki-duk as writer and director. The prolific enfant terrible of the burgeoning new Korean cinema returns to the softer territories that made his Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring (2003) an international hit. Although the plot here recalls an anti–Bonnie and Clyde, Kim is more interested in a metaphysics of domestic spaces. Enigmatic Tae-suk (Jae Hee) affixes flyers to house doors, checking back later to enter the homes of vacationing ’burb dwellers. Instead of robbing the flats, he makes himself dinner, repairs broken appliances, and even does the laundry. In one house, he encounters Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), a doe-eyed model battered by her domineering husband, and she joins him on his silent cruisings. The police catch up with the pair and Sun-hwa returns to her husband. In the final minutes, however, she and Tae-suk have a surreal reunion.

As in previous films, Kim imagines an insular world, but 3-Iron leaves the aquatic biospheres of The Isle (2000) and Spring, Summer for a string of bourgeois suburban interiors. Once again, violence and generic patterns simmer and erupt, but Kim has learned restraint. In the absence of language, material objects in 3-Iron take on a grand scale, functioning as vessels of communication. The last act’s conciliatory stasis — a mélange of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s uncanny Romanticism and Ghost — is the only undesirable: you won’t want Kim’s existential puzzle to be solved.