Lies (Korean: 거짓말; RR: Geojinmal) is a South Korean erotic drama adapted from Jang Jung-il’s banned novel Tell Me a Lie. It follows a sadomasochistic sexual relationship between a 38-year-old sculptor and an 18-year-old high-school student. Shot in a semi-cinéma vérité style, the film splices interviews with the author and cast between narrative scenes. It was built to provoke: full-frontal nudity, unsimulated sex, coprophilia, and blunt criticism of South Korean society. Domestic release was heavily censored; international prints circulated uncut.
For kink-aware viewers this is not a consent-education film. It is literary provocation cinema about obsession, beating, role reversal, and social exile—useful as media history, not as a how-to for negotiated play.
Synopsis
Y is an 18-year-old high-school senior. Her friend Woori has been corresponding with J, a 38-year-old sculptor. After speaking with him by phone, Y is aroused by his voice and arranges to meet at a love hotel so her first sex can be on her own terms rather than a repeat of the sexual violence she says her two sisters suffered. They have sex as soon as they enter the motel and continue with anal and oral sex.
At a later meeting J admits his interest in sadomasochism. Y allows him to beat her buttocks before they have sex again. Regular trysts follow; the beatings intensify and use a widening set of implements. At first Y cooperates mainly to please him, telling Woori she wants whatever he wants; eventually she begins to desire the beating itself.
When J visits his wife in Paris, the marriage frays further as he begs to be beaten and she refuses. The film makes clear his sexual needs have strained the marriage for years. After an especially brutal session, Y becomes angry; J offers to let her beat him. She takes the dominant role, and they end up alternating who strikes whom.
Y’s brother discovers the affair and sets fire to J’s house. Y cuts her hair and drops out of university; J leaves home. They live in hotels, have sex nightly, carve tattoos into their inner thighs, abandon ordinary work, and reject conventional society. When Y’s brother dies in a motorcycle accident and J runs out of money, Y leaves despite his pleas. J eventually moves to Paris to live with his wife.
Years later J receives a call from Y, who is stopping in Paris on her way to South America to live with her sister. They meet one last time in a hotel. She changes into her old school uniform and beats him with the handle of a pickaxe, fulfilling a fantasy he once described. After that encounter they never meet again. When later asked about his tattoo, J lies.
Production and Reception Notes
Onscreen sex stops just short of labeled hardcore in some markets, but production accounts and critical commentary treat intercourse and related acts as unsimulated in places. Notes around the production assert that the male lead fell in love with his co-star during filming and that the feeling was not returned—a detail that only thickens the film’s blur between performance, desire, and documentary framing.
As a piece of East Asian erotic cinema, Lies sits beside wider discussions of onscreen nudity, unsimulated sex, and literary sadomasochism. Its age-gap premise and non-consensual-adjacent social world are part of its scandal, not a template for ethical BDSM. Watch it as a censored-then-exported artifact of late-1990s Korean culture war over obscenity—and as a raw portrait of how beating, role switch, and secrecy can devour two lives without ever becoming a negotiated scene in the community sense of the word.
Reference points for further looking include the film’s IMDb entry, contemporary Village Voice coverage, and British Film Institute notes on its circulation and controversy.
