Part B of TIM GRAY's Three... Extremes dissection continues here.

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FANS and detractors of Miike alike will agree that, for better or worse, excess and inexplicability have linked the greater part of his recent works. It is refreshing, then, to see Miike produce something more tender, restrained and sorrowful than his previous forays into psychological horror. While it may sound culturally imperialistic to make such a comparison, it would be safe to say that fans of Lynch will instantly warm to the surreal, haunting Freudian dreamscape weaved by Miike in Box.

The short focuses on Kyoko, a writer, who is forced to confront painful memories of her past as a circus tent contortionist (!!), where she worked with her twin sister Shoko under the direction of their enigmatic and nightmarish sensei. Much of the film is presented in the form of dreams and flashbacks, creating a sense of narrative uncertainty as to the real and the imagined, a source of tension and anxiety in itself. Likewise, Miike practices a form of narrative ellipsis that leaves much of the film's content open to interpretation, but rather than using this as a license of steer the film towards complete narrative incoherence for the purpose of including a Few Cool Images, Miike spins the threads of unresolved pain and separation anxiety into a cohesive tale of tragic abandonment.

But this doesn't preclude Miike from delivering a Few Cool Images, with much of the horror of the film deriving from, as the name suggests, a box – something both claustrophobic and entrapping yet also a convenient storage space for Kyoko's personal angst. A theatrical, almost operatic atmosphere dominates, as images such as a lonely tree and a circus tent planted in an indistinct snowy landscape evoke pathos and sympathy for the detached Kyoko, the emotive dreamscape cheapened only slightly by stylishly functional yet horribly clichéd images of childish innocence such as a doll and a music box.

Perhaps Miike just wanted to fully exploit the whole "box thing", but even the trite music box theme music does little to detract from the adept synaesthesia of sound and image, the film's sorrowful music set against mesmerising winter imagery. Creaking corpses also return from their myriad appearances in East Asian psychological horror, but the typically angry, vengeful ghost is replaced by a sombre, lingering presence in Kyoko's subconscious.

In this way, Miike creates a far more visceral, cerebral experience than any of the other pieces in the trilogy, requiring us to fully enter the mind of Kyoko. Box offers a kind of melancholic pacing and subtlety that wholly eludes its counterparts, and leaves us feeling more sad than terrified – a welcome respite from the accompanying horrors.





IT WOULD seem that home invasion, captivity, torture and crushing dehumanisation have become the raison d'etre for Park Chan-wook if one looks at his previous two revenge films. It's with a little disappointment, then, that I laud the ingenuity with which Park has returned to these themes to make the most suspense-filled, thrilling and plainly disturbing entry in the Three... Extremes horror opus. Watching Cut, it is clear the see why Park declined to remake Evil Dead, instead taking the opportunity to self-indulgently bridge the gap between his soon-to-be-completed revenge trilogy and his boldly announced desire to make a "real" horror film.

Cut's 45 minutes of terror follow the ensnarement of nice-guy director Ryu Ji-ho by an obsessed fan/disgruntled employee archetype, used to represent Korea's socially dispossessed. Intent on proving the acclaimed Ji-ho is no better than the impecunious common man, he binds Ji-ho's less-than-virtuoso wife to a grand piano in a visually stunning web of piano strings and super glue, threatening to cut off one of her fingers for every five minutes Ji-ho goes without proving his own lack of humanity.

And prove it he does. The torturous process of dehumanisation under duress, of forced confessions and involuntary action is agonisingly executed to the point that we lose all sympathy for our protagonist as he slides towards trauma-induced inhumanity. Sound familiar to Park fans? Not as familiar as the technical aspects of the short, Park's trademark visuals of front-on character close-ups and theatrically arranged space bring potency and immediacy to the gruelling process, causing us to mangle our fingernails with increasing vigour as each digit falls to the floor.

Cut is not without its pitfalls however. Park's camp attempts at humour throughout are blacker than black, all deliberately sabotaged by the psychologically distressing situation, their incongruity with the mood leave the film somehow out of joint. Likewise, the antagonist's motivation, unlike Park's other films, is uniquely absurd. Rather than asserting a moral justification for his actions (i.e. his lower social status), the villain's only objective is to reduce Ji-ho to his own pitiful state of moral bankruptcy. The effect of this is that the entire authenticity of the psychological horror is compromised, and rather than creating either a believable or completely mysterious villain, we're left with a poorly characterised mish-mash of archetypes, giving the film a sense of incompleteness. Similarly, if Park had genuinely sought to engage with the social issues touched on in the film (such as social inequality, the plastic surgery industry in Korea, the position of women) then he surely could have done so in a less brutal and irreverent manner, as he did in his human-rights motivated short Never Ending Peace and Love.

But hey, this is horror. For all of its vampiric female characters, camp off-beat humour and sickening blended concoctions, Cut is both thrilling and profoundly disturbing, and a worthy entry into a trilogy principally concerned with keeping its audience up at night.





NO ONE attending a screening from That's Incredible Cinema should expect the film to fall within common standards of good taste and decency, but Fruit Chan's short Dumplings carves out its own category of psychological horror. This film is not recommended for those who've ever undergone an abortion. This film is not recommended for those who've ever been abused by a family member. This film is not recommended for those easily embarrassed by attempts at social commentary...

Disclaimers aside, Dumplings is as ineptly executed as it is morally repugnant. Chan's scattershot at "Biting Social Commentary" is so clumsy and insensitive in its attempts to lampoon the amorality of Mainland China's "One Child Policy" and at the same time to have a giggle at the narcissism of Hong Kong's social elite that it is sure to thin the audience's ranks as its arduous 37 minutes wear on. Laughs come at the price of the trilogy's character, as the sense of surreal psychological horror is replaced by our own indignation.

Perhaps this embarrassment would be alleviated if Chan were doing more than (albeit offensively) rehashing the idea of humanity's fear of physical decay and the measures we're prepared to take to counteract the passage of time. Oh, what an evil lot we are! Dumplings' Roman Catholic sensibilities don't end here, however, as we're subjected to the Miracle of Still Birth – fans of British documentary My Foetus will get another dose of embryonic slush to the soaring and sadistic score which will doubtlessly lift viewers' spirits before plunging them into an abyss of self-loathing and revulsion at the irrefutable evil of human society. Zzzz.

More disappointing however is that choice-as-cheese cinematographer Christopher Doyle's presence is barely felt. One senses we are a long way from the existence-trivialising beauty he almost single-handedly brought to Last Life in the Universe, or the hyper-real grittiness he brings to Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai's films. Instead, Doyle's contribution is marked by a mixture of washed-out colour and clumsy religious imagery, a remarkable failure to visually inject any pathos to the inhuman central characters.

Dumplings is the weakest of the three shorts and somewhat incongruous with the remainder of the trilogy in its failure to create nerve-wracking psychological horror. This is largely because there is so little human emotional depth or believability to the characters beyond their innate evil, with Chan apparently focusing on the gag-inducing rather than the thought-provoking.


» [Part A] | Part B