Diary

Mon Seung (2006), Hong Kong

Director : Oxide Pang

Synopsis

Diary narrates the story of Winnie, a solitary young woman who appears to have recently ended a relationship with her boyfriend, Seth. Encouraged by her best friend, Winnie decides to meet Ray whose appearance is very similar to that of her ex-boyfriend. Directed by Oxide Pang, Diary is a psychological thriller that will brilliantly lead the viewer through an excursion into Winnie’s mind, between what appears to be real and unreality itself.

Review

Chronologically, Diary follows Re-Cycle, the work that intended to end a cycle in the horror domains previously started by the Pang Brothers with the masterpiece The Eye. The psychological thriller initially explores the loneliness and depression of a young woman who appears to have been recently dumped by her boyfriend. The brilliance in this work however is its ability to repeatedly change the viewer’s perception of the story, repeatedly revealing a new reality until then unknown, as the originally structured storyline continues to suffer drastic metamorphoses along the movie. Accordingly, the director leads the viewer to believe that the movie had ended a number of times before it actually did, as a usually well-achieved final twist is, in this case, replaced by a symbolic number of twists and turns that brilliantly feed a dark and suffocating atmosphere of discomfort, focused on a limited number of characters. For the most part of the movie, the action is claustrophobically confined to just a few sets inside the main character’s apartment. Signs of paranoia and schizophrenia, dementia and isolation, as the director cleverly explores a disease that exhibits a several number of disturbing behavioral symptoms and a character that persuades herself to believe in things that are unreal and unrealistic.

Needless to say, the technical capacities of the Pang Brothers (cf. Ab-normal Beauty and Re-Cycle) are (once more) brilliantly explored by the director. Nevertheless, in this case, the character development appears to be the main priority of Oxide Pang, as the main character slowly reveals her psychologically fragile personality, later better described as obsessive, hopeless and extremely unstable. I agree though – the initial premise seems to be somehow a cliché of the Pang Brothers – how it is treated deserves however particular appreciation, as the character development seems to flow with certain spontaneity, without being dramatically rushed, inconsistent or exacerbated. A brilliant interpretation of the actress Charlene Choi, complemented by competent performances by Isabella Leong and Shawn Yue, must be as well pointed out. Diary comes out as a powerful experience into the tormented mind of a paranoid schizophrenic woman but, most importantly, the movie is able to distinguish itself from the predictable universe the Pang Brothers had given the viewer for the last four years, ironically achieving with Diary the same brilliance the directors had  aspired during the indicated period, without success.

Ab-normal Beauty

Sei mong se jun (2004), South Korea

Director : Oxide Pang

Produced : Pang Brothers

Synopsis

Ab-normal Beauty describes the story of Jin, an extremely talented arts student and photographer who finds herself with no inspiration in her work, seeking for what she defines as the ideal picture. After witnessing a car crash, the main character discovers to have a fascination with death, as she enthusiastically starts photographing the accident. At this moment, the viewer is promptly introduced to an obsession that the main character will eventually have to face along with the tumultuous repressed memories from her past.

Review

Ab-normal Beauty is a psychological horror film that explores the abnormal obsession and repressed memories of Jin, a perfectionist photographer with a troubled past and a clear lack of communication with her often absent mother. The first two thirds of the movie describe Jin’s growing obsession with death and an initial struggle to face the memories of a past traumatic sexual event, with sporadic moments of bizarre and aggressive violence that illustrate Jin’s disconnection from the reality. Race Wong does a proper work with her lead role as, interestingly enough, her real life sister Rosanne plays her lesbian girlfriend Jas. It is in fact the presence and comfort in Jas that ultimately appears to allow the main character to overcome her macabre obsession. In the last third of the movie, Jin finds herself back in a Lost Highway, when a videotape is left at her front door containing images of a brutal murder. The last half hour is thus unexpectedly feed with gruesome moments, explicit violence (that may be considered atypical in the Pang brothers’s filmography), voyeurism, masturbation and even auto-erotic asphyxiation. The scenes may somehow seem to be displaced to the viewer, yet their purpose is well placed in the movie as the unknown murderer appears to represent the extremely masculinized figure representing Jin's fear of being victimized by men.

While the argument appears to draw on contours of the biographical drama of a tortured artist who seems to find a bizarre beauty in a pile of decapitated chickens or in the corpse of a dog, unexpectedly followed by half hour of unpredicted violence, and whether or not the end really works, the viewer is expected to keep in mind that, all in all, Ab-normal Beauty shall be seen as a journey in which the main character is allowed to overpass her traumatic sexual experience. The character development at some point seems to be particularly accelerated during the first two thirds of the movie, as nothing much appears to occur. The peculiar fascination for death could have been developed in a much proper way, appearing to be, at some points, rushed and meaningless and not as deeper as the director would have wished. The film is beautifully filmed as expected from the Pang Brothers, the art and the use of red during the filming are particularly stunning, with a few brilliant moments such as the balcony scene, and others left to interpretation as the bath’s scene (cf. screenshot above). All in all, the film definitely has a few strong elements although it seems obvious that the director could have better exploited their potential. Accordingly, Ab-normal Beauty is without a doubt not comparable to The Eye for those seeking for similar experiences by the Pang brothers, although it remains a particularly interesting effort of Oxide Pang.

Re-Cycle

Gwai wik (2006), Hong Kong

Synopsis

Re-Cycle is one of the mostly well-achieved works of the Pang brothers (Danny and Oxide Pang), screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The film describes the story of a successful writer Tsui Ting-Yin (Angelica Lee) who founds herself with no inspiration for her new novel (entitled Re-Cycle), after writing one best-seller based on her own personal experiences. Battling against writer’s block and an obstinate publisher, her attempts to start the book appear to become even more dissipated with the reappearance of her former boyfriend after his divorce. After discarding a draft of the first chapter of the new book, a series of incidents start to happen in her own apartment, including mysterious phone calls and a few frightening elements that the Pang Brothers have previously proven to master.

Review

Until the release of Re-Cycle, the directors appeared to have struggled for a few years in order to achieve the same success obtained with The Eye. Following the predictable The Eye 2 and the absurd The Eye 10, Re-Cycle was mostly likely expected to continuously repeat the same formula and scares that have guaranteed before the success of the Pang Brothers. Therefore, when elements of The Eye, Dark Water and Ringu started to appear, I truly believed that Re-Cycle would most likely turned out to be just another unoriginal installment of the “series” and a new 108-minutes exercise of patience. The first thirty minutes, classifiable as tedious and predictable, have therefore comprised the supernatural long-haired woman cliché, the scene inside a lift as previously observed in The Eye, mysterious sounds from the other side of the phone, water running down walls, figures, shadows and endless calculable scares. Hopefully after thirty minutes the viewer is introduced to a new world in the Pang brothers’ universe and to a new series of elements where the viewer can no longer distinguish the line between horror and fantasy, leaving behind the concept of another (effortlessly created) ghost story.

From a technical point of view, the Pang Brothers have clearly surpassed themselves. Alongside with the plot, and Lee’s performance, the explosion of visual effects are the undoubtedly the third pillar of the movie. Visually superb, with a rich use of colour and a thin line between the opaque monochromatic tones and a few extremely saturated moments (as the screenshots above and below respectively demonstrate), Re-cycle is probably the most brilliantly masterpiece achieved by the Pang brothers in the technical field. Despite the vast number of events during the movie, the plot is conducted in a particularly slow pace up to the very end of the film. Angelica Lee is the main character of the film, delivering a particularly convincing and satisfactory performance, with only a few smaller roles being present during the whole movie. The character development follows the same path as the plot itself, which tends to be important when the movie depends on only one character. 

Re-cycle is still a good movie especially if one is able to disregard the exacerbated number of similar elements that are presented in the same movie. For someone who is not particularly familiarized with the directors’ universe, the Pang Brothers will prove to be genuinely competent in the Asian horror scene, providing a couple of particularly suspenseful and nerve-racking scenes. The movie is however able to write a conclusion for the successful formula that was pitifully dragged for too long after the release of The Eye.

Three... Extremes

Saam Gaang yi (2004), Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan

Synopsis

Three… Extremes is an Asian cross-cultural trilogy of horror films from three accomplished Asian directors of three different Asian countries. The movie is the second installment of the proposed series of two films, following its particularly well-achieved antecessor Three (2002). From the point of view of the viewer, Three...Extremes (or Three, Monster) had for objective to provide an improved installment of three segments, a task considered to be partly complicated given the many brilliant elements present in the previous compilation, but in the other hand plausibly realistic given the inexistent balance that Three failed to find. Three…Extremes comprises as indicated before three segments: Dumplings by Fruit Chan (Hong Kong), Cut by Park Chan-Wook (South Korea) and Box by Takashi Miike (Japan). With the movie clearly intended to heavily rely on two of the most promising names in the current Asian horror scene, Three... Extremes would be considered to be clearly superior, achieving the success that Three was never able to attain. The movie clearly reaches for the extreme that exists within the viewer, for our greatest fears, obsessions, repulsions, superbly bringing out the worst inside every single human being.

Review

Dumplings is the first segment of the film, introducing the viewer to the story of Mrs. Lee (Miriam Yeung), an aging movie star who has long ago lost the attention of her husband and has therefore decided to visit Aunt Mei (Bai Ling), an old woman who still has the looks of her youth due to a secret disturbing and gruesome ingredient in her own dumplings recipe. For those who are not familiarized with the work of Fruit Chan, up to the movie release and with the exception of the present segment, the director's filmography predominantly considered particularly uninteresting plots with prostitution and other problems of the modern Hong Kong society as its main backgrounds. Dumplings starts promptly, with the viewer being introduced in the first five minutes of the film, to the special ingredient in Aunt Mei’s dumplings recipes.  The director clearly does not fear to shock the viewer, being at this precise point that Fruit Chain clearly reinvents himself. Still focusing in previously developed work, with a dark satire of elements of the Hong Kong society, Dumpling provides a noteworthy clin d'oeil to a large range of social issues such as incest, the gap between social classes, the detrimental obsession with youth, immigration and clandestine abortions.  A brilliant nerve-racking soundtrack by Chan Kwong-wing is accompanied by a veritable parade of disturbing sounds and noises orchestrating a disquieting atmosphere, giving the film a tremendously well-achieved audible character and surely providing a constant feeling of repulsion. A 90-minute version of the segment was released in the same year, with a different twist at the end, and allowing Fruit Chan to explore a high number of elements that were somehow undervalued in the short story.

Cut describes the story of a filmmaker (Lee Byung-hun) kidnapped by a figurant/extra (Lim Won-hee) of a few of his previous movies, to whom is given the opportunity of saving his wife (Gang Hye-jung) by killing an innocent child. The genius previously observed in Park Chan-wook work (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Oldboy) is once more registered in the present brilliantly executed segment. The film follows in a distorted "quest for revenge" schema, reminding the viewer in some ways of the Vengeance Trilogy of the same director. Based upon a surrealistic reality, the film is most likely defined as an unclear voyage inside the mind of the protagonist, into an intriguing environment of uncertainty and terror where, beyond psychosis, the existing sporadic humor (particularly displaced and absurd), only leads to further confusion. Visually stunning and with a correct use of colour and light, Cut includes a few creatively executed scenarios, although for the majority of the movie, the action is claustrophobically confined to one single set. Cut culminates beautifully in a fatal climax, where the reality and the reality that the protagonist appears to see collapse in an abysmal emotional density. The short film is without a doubt a brilliant masterpiece and considered to be the best segment of the trilogy.

Kyoko (Kyoko Kasegawa) is a writer tormented by the accidental death of her twin sister, when they both had only ten years old. One day, the main protagonist discovers in her desk an invitation for a meeting in the exact same place where her sister died. The work of the controversial director Takashi Miike is long (Audition, Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q), shining in a considerably large range of themes. The film mixes in a particularly exacerbated way dream and reality, tending to be somehow confusing, and giving the viewer a certain insecurity concerning the direction of plot. Miike succeeds however to toast the viewer with a particularly outstanding camera-work, characteristic and constantly well-achieved during the film, with a few shooting elements consistent with the final twist and interesting visual effects that generate a suffocating atmosphere due in part to the disturbing horror felt by the protagonist. All in all, I tend to believe that Box represents in some ways the filmography of Takashi Miike in one single word: irregular. Therefore, although being considered in general a satisfying concise work, Box could clearly have been developed in a more brilliant way as Takashi Miike as previously proven to be capable of.

Three

Saam Gaang (2002), South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong

Synopsis

Three comprises three short films from three different directors of different nationalities: Memories by Jee-woon Kim (South Korea), The Wheel by Nonzee Nimibutr (Thailand) and Going Home by Peter Chan (Hong Kong), producer of the sequel The Eye. The movie is the first installment created as an international cooperation between three different Asian countries, followed two years later by the successfully acclaimed Three... Extremes. Due to the success of the later, Three is sometimes considered to be a sequel of the second movie, having even been "incorrectly" denominated as Three Extremes II.  Interestingly, each segment of both movies tends to reflect the culture of each country, its own beliefs, traditions and mysticisms.

Review

With Memories, Jee-Woon Kim demonstrates the quality that turned out to be observed a year later with the brilliantly executed A Tale of Two Sisters. The segment describes the story of a man (Bo-seok Jeong), with no recollection of the moments leading up to the sudden disappearance of his wife a few days before, and the story of an amnesic woman (Hye-su Kim), who wakes up in another part of the town, trying desperately to remember her way back home. The film is mostly a concise work, well accomplished and particularly well structured, notwithstanding the somehow predictable (but still well achieved) final twist. Competent acting, visually captivating with a beautiful camera-work and easily instilling a good sense of terror in the viewer, Memories is nonetheless slightly corrupted by an obvious (and sometimes fastidious) similarity to the film Ringu and to classic clichés of the actual Asian horror scene.

After Memories, The Wheel is somehow a clear disappointment, going far beyond from the fact that I usually tend to not particularly appreciate films where the main terror source is an evil puppet, as the present one. The segment is about an arts troupe grappling with the curse of an evil puppet that surrounds the obscure deaths of a high number of characters. Beyond the predominantly annoying poor acting during the film, The Wheel fails principally by suffocating a poor plot with exacerbated horror and dramatic elements comprising drownings, fires, asphyxiations, sudden agonizing deaths, suicides, prohibited passions, possessions and even ghosts. Tedious, The Wheel is undoubtedly the piece that does not fit in the compilation, alienating a possible smooth transition between the three short stories and becoming (after a few hilarious moments) a constant exercise of patience. The story allows however the viewer to have an interesting cultural experience of rural Thailand, introducing us to a few traditions, mysticisms and to a genre of dance drama from Thailand (Khon), being culturally the richest segment among the compilation.

“A cop searching for his missing son when he is kidnapped by a man who keeps his wife locked inside their apartment” is the premise of Going Home, which is by far the longest and clearly the most developed segment of the three stories. A grotesque love story, reaching the limits of the macabre. Clearly lacking the frightening factor and punctuated by a series of events constantly introduced in a particular slow pace, the film excels by its nature undoubtedly touching, intelligent, and with an unpredictable twist at the end for a story impeccably performed and interpreted.