| Director | Kim Ki-duk |
|---|---|
| Box office | $9.5 million |
The film is divided into five segments (the titular seasons), each segment depicting a stage in the life of a novice Buddhist monk and his older teacher. The segments are roughly 10 to 20 years apart, and the action of each takes place during the season in question. The story unfolds rather simply, but the implications of the characters' actions are silently commented upon by the presence of Buddhist symbols and iconography.
A young Buddhist apprentice lives with his master in a small floating monastery, drifting on a lake in the serene forested mountains of Korea. The boy and his master live a life of prayer and meditation, using an old rowboat to reach the bank of the lake, where they regularly go walking for exercise and to collect herbs. In this part of the film, the animal owned by the monastery is a dog, a Buddhist symbol of fidelity to one's master.
One day, in a creek among the rocky hills, the apprentice torments a fish by tying a small stone to it with string and laughing as it struggles to swim. Shortly after, he does the same to a frog and a snake; his master quietly observes all three occasions, and that night he ties a large, smooth rock to the apprentice as he sleeps. In the morning, he tells his apprentice that he cannot take off the rock until he unties the creatures he tormented—adding that if any of them have died, he will "carry the stone in his heart forever". The boy struggles with the load on his back through the forest and finds the fish lying dead at the bottom of the creek, the frog still alive and struggling where he left it, and the snake in a pool of blood, presumably attacked and killed by another animal, unable to get away. The master watches as the boy begins to cry heavily at seeing what he has done to the snake.
The apprentice, now a teenager, encounters a mother and daughter dressed in modern clothes, indicating that the film takes place in modern times, walking along the forest path to look for the monastery. The apprentice silently greets and rows them across the lake to the monastery, where a colorful rooster is now part of the household. In Buddhist art, this bird is the representation of desire and craving. The daughter has an unspecified illness, displaying symptoms of a fever, and her mother brings her to the master in the hope of healing her. The master agrees to take in the teenage girl for a time, and the mother leaves. Over the next few days, the apprentice gets sexually attracted to the girl but is too shy to say anything; however, when he finds her sleeping in front of the Buddha statue, he gropes her breast. She wakes up and slaps him. In a guilty panic, the apprentice begins to pray incessantly, something his master notes as strange. Touching the apprentice's shoulder, the girl seems to forgive him.
Eventually, the two wander off into the forest and have sex. They repeat the act over the next few nights, hiding their relationship from the master, until he discovers them asleep and naked, drifting around the lake in the rowboat. He wakes them up by pulling the plug out of a drain hole in the boat. Rather than expressing anger or disappointment, he merely warns his apprentice that "lust leads to a desire for possession and possession leads to murder" and says the girl must leave since she has recovered from her illness. After the master rows the girl ashore the following morning, the apprentice is distraught and runs away that night in pursuit of her, taking the monastery's Buddha statue and the rooster with him. The implications of his two thefts are that while burdened with his craving as symbolized by the bird, he also has with him the "burden" of his master's teachings, as symbolized by the Buddha statue.
Many years later in fall, the aging master returns from a supply run to a nearby village, bringing a cat in his backpack.
By chance, he glimpses a story about his former apprentice in a newspaper: He is wanted for the murder of his wife. Foreseeing his protege's return, he modifies the teenage monk's garments by hand, and soon afterward, the apprentice appears at the spiritual door at the lake's edge, full of anger and carrying the bloodstained knife with which he stabbed his wife for having an affair with another man. Unwilling to live, he seals his eyes, mouth and nose in a suicide ritual (after brushing the Chinese character for "closed" on each of the seals) and sits in front of the newly returned Buddha statue, waiting for death. The master discovers him and beats him ruthlessly, declaring that while he may have killed his wife, he will not kill himself so easily. He ties his bloodied apprentice to the ceiling and sets a candle to slowly burn through the rope, then begins writing out the "Heart Sutra" on the monastery deck, holding the cat in his arms and dipping its tail into a bowl of black ink. The apprentice eventually falls and, beginning his repentance, cuts his hair off and is ordered to carve the Chinese characters into the wood to quiet his heart.
Two detectives arrive at the monastery to arrest the apprentice, but the master asks them to allow him until the next day to finish his task. The apprentice continues throughout the night and collapses into sleep immediately upon finishing. Influenced by the soothing presence of the master, the detectives help the old monk paint his apprentice's carvings in orange, green, blue and purple. This appears to quiet their hearts as well.
The apprentice wakes up and is peacefully taken away by the detectives, with the cat accompanying them in the back of the boat. In Buddhism, "the body of the cat is the temporary resting place of the soul of very spiritual people". When the monk brings back the cat (before he has gained information about the former apprentice), it demonstrates that at his advanced age, he has, in his solitude, achieved some form of inner peace and foreshadows his death.