Even though Lee Chang-dong’s fourth film, Milyang (Secret Sunshine) was adapted from Lee Chung-joon’s Bulre Yiyagi (A Bug’s Story), the film shows quite different messages. Rather than the aporia or hypocrisy of forgiveness found in the novel, indeed, the film focuses on the wounds, salvation, and the meaning of life. In this regard, as Milyang portrays the heroine (Shin-ae)’s successive failures in fantasy-construction of her self-identity, this paper explores how the director Lee transfigures her drastic destitution into a new beginning, a new possibility of true self-identification concerned with ethical awakening, and how the film represents Milyang, an ordinary medium-size city far from Seoul, as a metaphor with intense thematic suggestion. Lastly, examining the mise-en-abyme structure at the end of the film, along with the open ending, this paper delves into how the director Lee involves spectators in the ethical obligations, particularly with regard to the ethical responsiveness and response-ability toward the other, re-questioning the spectatorial ethics itself in looking at in such visualized terrain.