One winter, Soon-seok (Kim Myeong-kon) heads to Gangwon Province to scatter the ashes of his wife, who died three years earlier. On the road, he encounters an elderly man on the brink of death and the man’s nurse, Mrs. Choi (Lee Bo-hee), and learns that the old man—whose hometown lies north of the Armistice Line—wishes to die “as close to the North as possible.” Soon-seok refuses to help at first, but after two women connected to him die in succession during his journey, he sets out to find the old man and Mrs. Choi again.

Based on Lee Je-ha’s story of the same title, director Lee Jang-ho’s The Man with Three Coffins borrows the outer form of a road movie and, rather than explaining division and loss head-on, approaches them obliquely through a sensibility haunted by apparitions, omens, and shamanic presences. Lee has noted that it was more fruitful to receive the original text sensorially than to analyze it in a strictly structural way, and he once likened Lee Je-ha’s writing to “automatic writing.” In that spirit, the film’s production also leans on improvisation and intuition: instead of following a pre-scouted route, it tracks shifting conditions and choices on location, pushing a rhythm that deliberately unsettles causal smoothness and disrupts narrative immersion to the very end.