Ardor 2002

A thirty-year-old housewife, Mi-heun, is visited by a woman in a red sweater. The woman smirks and claims that Mi-heun’s husband is her lover. These words shatter Mi-heun’s sense of security and cast a long shadow over her days. The woman follows Mi-heun into another room and strikes her in the head with a blunt object. Mi-heun collapses, the injury is only superficial, and she ends up with a few stitches on the scalp. The trauma leaves her rattled and wary, as she tries to piece together what happened and why.

Mi-heun and her family start a new life in the countryside, attempting to pretend nothing horrible occurred. Her husband Dong-wook leaves his beloved job and opens a small book store, hoping for a quiet, ordinary existence. Yet the night’s memory lingers, and Mi-heun is haunted by headaches that gnaw at her, making it hard to breathe or sleep. She struggles to vent her heartache and faces the ache largely on her own. In the quiet, she clings to the moments she can share with her daughter, trying to find some solace in small, everyday joys while the past hums just beneath the surface.

In-gyu is a not-so-busy country town doctor who spends his free time fishing by the nearby lake. Beyond his medical practice, his nights are fueled by a certain hardness—he pursues sexual encounters with women, while his wife lives in the city and seems indifferent to his wandering lifestyle. As Mi-heun wrestles with the weight of her trauma, the two cross paths in a moment that shifts the ground beneath her feet. One day, while Mi-heun sits under the blazing sun at a rest stop, a sharp, piercing voice cuts through her numbness and draws her toward an uncertain danger. She resists with every ounce of will, yet the pull of the moment drags her toward him, and she falls into him body and soul, caught between fear and longing.

In-gyu provides Mi-heun with an overwhelming answer to the questions that torment her, and she slips further into a dangerous game of sex that offers no real escape or love, only a growing dependency and a sense of risk. The affair begins to redefine what she believes she can have, even as the world around her becomes more fragile and unsettled.

Mi-heun’s husband decides to make a pond outside their new house, a project that once symbolized normalcy and progress. When workers arrive, Mi-heun finds herself slipping away to meet her lover, and it isn’t long before her husband discovers the affair. He unravels, blaming Mi-heun for wrecking all his hard-earned efforts to keep the marriage intact, a harsh reckoning that amplifies the fracture between them.

As the summer wears on and the tensions mount, Mi-heun walks barefoot through heavy woods, the sun beating down on her. The doctor who has become her lover finds her and takes her home, but they both know they cannot marry—doing so would only cause more pain. They acknowledge the impossibility of their love and face the uncertain future with a shared, aching question: what now? And so the film lingers, leaving the consequences of their choices to unfold beyond the frame, in a story that continues to echo the cost of desire, memory, and the fragile hope of renewal.