Brushing (1998), about an overweight teenage boy who is left home alone with his senile grandfather, was invited to the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

[6] Yim then played a small supporting role in Bong Joon-ho's monster movie The Host (2006), as a white-collar worker who betrays his college friend.

[8][9] Inspired by the titular fairy tale, in Hansel and Gretel (2007) a young man (Chun Jung-myung) gets lost in a forest and stumbles into a house inhabited by three strange children (Shim Eun-kyung, Eun Ji-won and Jin Ji-hee) who refuse to let him leave.

[11][12] Despite praise for their striking visuals and surprising narrative twists, both of Yim's films were unsuccessful at the box office, which led to him having difficulty finding financing for his succeeding projects.

Scarlet Innocence is a modern-day retelling of the classic Korean folktale Simcheongga; in the original, a virtuous girl named Shim Chung sacrifices herself so that her father's sight may be restored.

But in Yim's film noir, a university professor gradually succumbing to blindness moves to a rural town and begins an obsessive affair with a young woman 17 years his junior (played by Jung Woo-sung and Esom, respectively).