My first Kim Ki-Duk, and feeling rather puzzled (spoilers)

It's difficult to figure out what I think of this movie. Over all I was not pleasantly impressed, but this might be due to not quite understanding what the heck it was about. I got some bits and pieces of stuff, but I have no idea how to assemble them, whether they can be assembled at all. Here they are, in random order:

- I got some Wong Kar Wai: each actor talking in their native language, as in 2046, and some hints of the plot from In the Mood for Love - awkward relationship between the official/former partners of an adulterous/new couple.

- I got some hints of an active-male / passive-female principle, possibly pointing to Yin and Yang, or just to general social roles, both embedded in the subconscious of otherwise decent members of a human society. When the two fell asleep, their inner? true? magical? essence awoke, and his was active, guiding hers, who was passive.

- I also got some hints of the Buddhist doctrine of sufferance and freeing oneself from it - we witness the pain of not getting what one wants, the pain of getting what one does not want, the pain of aging / general sufferance. And then we get butterflies in the end. Oh and also Buddhist images. And a bell.

- The two "main" characters seemed to be one and the same, for a while. I thought we were going in that direction, with some torn inner two halves having to cooperate in order to achieve happiness - the two have the same phone, same clock, find themselves suddenly at each other's place and so on. But we didn't actually go there.

- And then there was slapstick about keeping oneself awake, sliding into something that was supposed to be unsettling, then sliding into gore and Oldboy. And the other female turns out to have been a regular inmate at the mental hospital, eventually helping the main female to commit butterflide and free herself. And the other male ends up dead, which might mean that he had been a real character all along.

- After the main female went sleepwalking, she complained that she went back to her unwanted former boyfriend, although the main male seems to have spent the same unit of time chasing after his former girlfriend. So what exactly was happening during the sleepwalking episodes? Was she/he having threesomes with the happy couple? Or ok, metaphorical reading, it was a time when they were both returning to the ghosts of the past, Solaris-style, but this hardly ties up with the rest of the movie.

- The two main beings were both creative, she was designing bits of cloth (illusions? more Buddhist stuff?), while he was creating some kanji stamps with vague spiritual hints, like "dreams" and "white black stuff stuff".

Now, was there anything to tie these things up?

there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder