The director of the subversive Korean arthouse melodrama THE HOUSEMAID gets even weirder with WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

Studious Kim Young-gul (Jeong-cheol Kim) has little time or interest in women, and it seems just as well as the first woman who enchants him on a nature expedition with his school friends is a suicidal woman who does not want to enter the afterlife alone and tries to make him part of a murder-suicide pact. Although the police determine he is faultless in the woman's death, he become preoccupied by suicidal thoughts. His first attempt to end his life, however, is scuttled by an eccentric bookseller who claims that he can withstand death through sheer willpower and tries to badger Young-gul into accepting that belief to the point where he murders the man (only for him to keep coming back even after being burned alive). Apparently having developed a new outlook on life after that experience, Young-gul and his classmate visit a cave system and make off with a two thousand year old skeleton of a female in order to sell it to archaeologist Professor Lee (Kung-won Nam), but the skeleton comes back to life as a beautiful woman who claims to have fasted for thirty days in the cave to escape an arranged marriage when a shaman told her she would return two thousand years later and meet a man she could really love. Young-gul returns her affections, but the catch is that she needs to eat a raw human liver to survive; and if not a stranger's than his? Young-gul then becomes an apprentice to Professor Lee who has of late been busy appraising human skulls sent to him by an unknown benefactor, and the young man Young-gul is replacing had quit because he started receiving strange packages in the mail. Not only does Young-gul start to receive similar packages, he also discovers that the professor's high-strung artist daughter was supposed to be the partner in death of the suicidal woman who tried to kill him, and she is developing her own deadly attraction to him.

A completely bonkers art film/horror hybrid full of crazy women, severed heads, festering maggots, and more, it is hard to determine whether WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH is at all serious about its strangely uplifting message about the difficulty of living life and the will to persist in times of utter despair. Essentially a series of vignettes chronically the slow emotional growth of the protagonist with the sentimentality of a Korean soap spiked with gore, the film is entirely unpredictable in its plot turns but also quite hilarious both in its delivery of macabre punchlines but also its seemingly deliberate bargain basement realization of some of its surreal touches from badgering skeletons to human-sized butterflies carrying away characters to death. Had Korean director Ki-young Kim not been restrained by financing and Korean production quotas and allowed his imagination to run wild with this thread of filmmaking, he might have become the Jess Franco of Asia. While the director's THE HOUSEMAID is better known outside of Korea – more so than the two remakes he undertook and the exported 2010 remake – WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH is another rare Mondo Macabro discovery that would make an interesting companion piece to the Latvian film THE SPIDER.

Unreleased in the United States and not exported outside of Korea, WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH was unfortunately devalued in Korea as well and poorly archived as the elements for this 4K scan bear out. The original anamorphic photography was probably always a little soft but the first reel is most distracting with its fading, yellow bias in the skintones, and damage. These issues are less severe during the rest of the film, enough so that the suitably engrossed viewer will rarely notice them. Digital restoration presumably includes attempts to restore the original degree of color saturation in the color gels, and some fine detail might be lost in the more saturated lighting, but this is a restoration of a film on its last legs and the content is more than compelling enough to ignore such issues. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono Korean track is fairly clean with fewer issues than the picture element, and the English subtitles suggest that a degree of black humor is intentional.

For a rare film little known outside of Korea and Asian cineasts, Mondo Macabro have outfitted the film with a healthy roster of extras. First up is an audio commentary by Kenneth Brorsson and Paul Quinn of the What's Korean Cinema podcast. The track is equal parts informative with regard to the Kim's reputation in Korea and his struggles with censorship and the restrictions of the Korean production quota – WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH was greenlighted simply because they needed another feature rather than for its content – the background of the cast, and recurring themes in the director's filmography, and also analytical with questions as to whether the dialogue is meant to be so on-the-nose and whether one should look too deep into the film for substance or whether the Kim was just having fun. Also informative is an interview with critic Darcy Paquet (14:59) who won an award in 2011 at the Busan International Film Festival for his efforts introducing Korean cinema to the world. He looks at the Kim's background, his beginnings as a dentist where he met his wife – noting that the recurring theme of women destructively stepping outside of traditional norms may have arisen from his wife having to support him as a dentist when times were tough between films – his hit THE HOUSEMAID which he returned two twice later, and how WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTEFLY OF DEATH marked a turning point in his career. He also notes the director's pleasure at being rediscovered in the nineties at the Busan International Film Festival, plans to travel to Germany for a festival, and even getting back into motion pictures only for a short circuit to cause a fire in his house which killed him and his wife in their sleep.