A hoodlum Dongpal (Choi, Jae-Sung), a labor union activist Keeyoung (Cha, Kwang-Soo) and an amateur writer Yujin (Lee, Jee-Hyung) are three fugitives who happen to find a hiding place at a comic book rental shop in a working-class district in Seoul. 
The beautiful shop owner called ‘Madam’ (Choi, Myung-Kil) is running the place.  People ‘kill time’ in this place with reading comic books and pulp novels, watching bootleg videos, drinking coffee and eating instant noodles.  AT night, the place serves as a shelter for those who cannot afford to stay at hotel, as long as they can pay a ‘midnight charge.’ 
While spending nights at the shop, Dongpal keeps trying to find his friend Panko who disappeared the day they committed a crime together.  As days go by, he is attracted by the beauty of Madam and one day he almost rapes her at her shop.  Madam ignores Dongpal after that, but he hangs around Madam and gets her permission to stay at the shop. 
Spending their time together at the shop, three men -Dongpal, Keeyoung and Yujin- get to know each other.  One day Dongpal kicks out the neighborhood hoodlums from the shop by force.  Then they come back in his absence to destroy the shop.  Dongpal gets revenge on them but the shop is in ruins.  Three men get together and they decide to rebuild the shop with their own hands.  In the process, madam gets to know Dongpal better and three men seem to find their peace in their newly-established ‘home’.  But their peace turns out to be a short-lived one when the gangsters looking for Dongpal and the government agents chasing Keeyoung raided the shop…. . 

<AWARDS> 
 -Nantes (France) Int’l Film Festival 
  Best Actress