General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

301, 302 (삼공일 삼공이)

301, 302 (삼공일 삼공이; also released as Three-Oh-One, Three-Oh-Two) is a 1995 South Korean psychological thriller directed by Park Chul-soo, about two single women living in adjoining apartments of a Seoul high-rise whose opposite relationships with food, compulsive cooking and eating on one side and refusal of food on the other, escalate into a fatal intimacy¹. It was the first film made by Park's own production company, Park Chul-soo Films, founded in 1994²; the 1995 Grand Bell Award for Best Film, Korea's top film prize, went instead to The Eternal Empire³^•¹⁵.

Key fact	Detail
Director / production	Park Chul-soo; Park Chul-soo Films, his first production under his own company¹^•²
Screenplay	Lee Suh-gun, from an original work by Kim Su-kyung⁴
Release	April 22, 1995 (South Korea); rated 18 and over⁴
Runtime	99 minutes (KOFA record; other databases list 100 to 101 minutes)¹
Lead cast	Bang Eun-jin as Song-hee (apartment 301), Hwang Shin-hye as Yoon-hee (apartment 302), Kim Chu-ryeon as the detective¹
Major awards	Blue Dragon Film Awards for Best Actress (Bang Eun-jin) and screenplay³^•⁴
International standing	Korea's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar; screened in the Panorama section of the 46th Berlin International Film Festival⁵^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in a "new hope bio-apartment" marketed as bringing dreams and hope to city dwellers worn down by urban life¹. Song-hee (Bang Eun-jin), a divorced woman with an eating compulsion, moves into apartment 301. In her marriage she cooked constantly for her husband and found her sense of worth in it; when he turned away from her she became fixated on food, eventually cooking and serving her husband's pet dog, for which he divorced her¹.

Her neighbor in 302 is Yoon-hee (Hwang Shin-hye), a freelance writer who suffers from food refusal. As a child, hiding from the sexual assaults of her butcher stepfather in a freezer, she saw a neighborhood child freeze to death imitating her; since then she has rejected both food and sex, although she ironically writes columns about sex for women's magazines¹.

From the day Song-hee moves in, she mounts a continuous campaign of cooking for Yoon-hee, who cannot keep any of it down⁴. The film opens after Yoon-hee has disappeared, with a detective (Kim Chu-ryeon) questioning Song-hee, and unfolds through flashbacks from both women's points of view⁵^•⁶. When each learns the other's past, the two reach an understanding, and Yoon-hee proposes that Song-hee use her body as an ingredient for a dish; Song-hee accepts¹.

Production and context

Park Chul-soo, then a mid-career director known for films centered on women such as Mother (1985) and A Pillar of Mist (1986), founded Park Chul-soo Films in 1994 and made 301, 302 as its first project⁷^•². In a 1995 interview he described the film as an explicitly independent production, saying he wanted to move beyond one-dimensional feminist statements and express women's loneliness and alienation through the unusual subjects of an eating disorder and a cooking compulsion⁸.

The apartment setting carries the film's social argument. A study of apartment imagery in Korean cinema notes that the interiors of the two suites are designed to mirror their occupants: suite 301 is a clean, cold, kitchen-centered space with an oversized table reflecting the perfectionist chef, while suite 302 uses warm wood and natural light for the writer, and the film's real subject is the two women's loneliness and difficulty communicating across the wall between them⁹.

Reception and significance

Domestic awards. At the 16th Blue Dragon Film Awards it took Best Actress for Bang Eun-jin and the screenplay award, and at the 6th Chunsa Film Art Awards Bang Eun-jin again won Best Actress alongside a special makeup award; the film also received a new cinematographer award at the 19th Golden Cinema Awards⁴.

International release. 301, 302 was Korea's official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film⁵ and played in the Panorama section of the 46th Berlin International Film Festival⁴. It was the first Korean title submitted to the Sundance Film Festival, in 1996, and was distributed worldwide². It became one of the first Korean movies to receive a theatrical release in the United States¹¹, opening there on May 3, 1996⁵, and reached Japanese theaters on March 15, 1997³.

Critical reading. Reviewers treated the film as a dark comedy and psychological suspense piece built on the relationship between food and sex⁵. The scholar Joan Kee, writing in positions: east asia cultures critique in 2001, read the film's stylized opening and its crosscutting between past and present as an articulation of hysteria and of the emerging visibility of the independent urban woman in contemporary Korean film¹². A HanCinema review called it the first film of contemporary South Korean cinema in which feminism is the main theme, organized around food, the food-sex connection, and the reasons each woman arrived at her stance¹³. The New Yorker later described its taboo-violating ending as presaging the reputation for extremity Korean cinema would acquire in the following years¹¹.

Afterlife. The film was remade in English as Compulsion (2013), starring Heather Graham and Carrie-Anne Moss¹³. The Korean Film Archive restored it in 2K in 2023 and released it on its YouTube channel, Korean Classic Film, in April 2024¹⁴.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Psychological horror films › Psychological horror films, 1990s and 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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