Why watch a Kim Ki-duk film? I raise the question because, depending on the film, it probably won’t be a pleasurable experience.

Kim’s work is often an affront to bourgeois sensibility. For instance, there’s the scene in his 1999 feature, “The Isle,” where a mute woman inserts the lengths of fishing hooks between her legs, and then pulls. Or in “Samaritan Girl” (2003), where the father brutally beats a man in a public restroom, a scene almost horrific for being so long. Or the incomprehensible yet strangely absorbing “The Coast Guard” (2002), where the lead character stands amid a civilian crowd, going through standard rifle maneuvers in full uniform before shooting himself through the mouth.

Art, violence, masculinity, sex — it’s all there, and it is the stuff from which Kim writes and shoots these strange, evocative, idiosyncratic and sometimes frustrating films. Unlike his more recent “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring” (2003) and “3-Iron” (2004), both of which are strong films, “The Isle,” “Samaritan Girl” and “The Coast Guard” seem less concerned with telling a story than it does with just shooting something. And “shooting” can be taken for all its meanings. Consider “Real Fiction” (2000).

Touted as an artistic exercise, “Real Fiction” was shot in little over three hours with 10 film cameras and two digital-video cameras rolling simultaneously, and all in real time (hence the “Real” in the title). Amazing as this is, it ultimately has no bearing on the story. The film focuses on a portrait illustrator, played by Ju Jin-mo, who is tired of being bullied around. Persuaded to follow a petite girl who had been videotaping him, he enters a theater where his repressed anger and frustration is released. Following this explosion, he proceeds to track down every person who has done him injustice and kills them one by one. At the end, after our hero’s serial murder spree, the film returns to the park where he continues to sketch the exact same sitter, the suggestion being the entire experience had been imagined (hence “Fiction” in the title).

I have a great appreciation for the persistence of theme and vision in Kim’s films. But at times I feel it was a wasted effort to sit through his work; that the whole experience was empty because I had gained nothing from it except confusion and a funny feeling in my gut. And in all honesty, films so heavy in symbolism and meaning don’t make for very pleasant viewing. Yet, I also realize it’s not fair to approach a film like “Real Fiction” expecting to be entertained in the way we expect with a Steven Spielberg movie — where all we do is sit back and let the story piece everything together for us, eventually providing a happy moral near the end. However, we don’t do this for a Krzysztof Kieslowski or a John Cassavetes, whose films challenge viewers, testing our patience, making us work and think, as we not only watch their films but actually experience their singular worlds. Such is the case, though to a lesser degree, with Kim.