David Bordwell wrote:
Warnings about gay sadomasochism to the contrary, this doesn’t offer much you can’t see in Warhol or Waters. What it does provide is three shots. The first, nearly 45 minutes long, provides virtually a one-act play about a motel tryst between a businessman and his teenage lover. The second shot shifts us to an anonymous sexual encounter that is admittedly fairly off-putting, but handled with the mix of casual framing and off-kilter suspense we find in, again, Warhol. The very last shot is very brief and puts the other two into a new context.
Tony Rayns wrote:
Faceless Things shows two acts of gay sadomasochistic sex—one acted, the other not—with such bare-faced cheek that some viewers will be repelled. But this remarkable movie announces the 21-year-old Kim as a filmmaker in the Apichatpong league: an allusive poet whose direction of non-pro actors is as impressive as his grasp of the possibilities and limitations of cinematic form. The film consists of only three shots, the first (around 45 minutes) fiction, the second (around 20 minutes) documentary, and the third (very brief) something else. Exploring the space between cleanliness and “dirt,” this is the indie triumph of the year.
Director's statement:
Quote:
When I was a teen, sick and tired of this disgusting world, I began to meet strange men secretly. All these relationships are written in my journal, recorded by the camcorder, or between the traces of my memories. In the sight of candid shot, or in the pornography-like representation, I and they (in and out of the frame) were just like a funambulism on a single line struggling with out lives. Looking back now, I realize why I wrote and taped them. In their hidden faces that "the daytime-people" can never see, I saw myself sinking below ceaselessly.