A boy is brought to a deer farm to practice a custom that will help him become a strong grown-up.
Tag Archives: Korean
CAPSULE: SUDDENLY IN THE DARK (1981)
DIRECTED BY: Young Nam Ko
FEATURING: Kim Young-ae, Lee Ki-seon, Yoon Il-bong
PLOT: A Korean housewife believes that their new maid is having an affair with her husband; is it all in her imagination, or does it have something to do with the mysterious shaman’s doll the strange girl carries around everywhere?
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A rare Eighties horror from South Korea, recently “rediscovered” and released on Blu-ray by Mondo Macabro, Suddenly is not quite a lost classic (and not especially weird by our standards), but it is a solid psychological horror/drama with a unique focus on female sexual insecurity.
COMMENTS: Suddenly in the Dark is unusual not merely because it’s female-centered, but because it revolves around a very particular female anxiety—the fear that a wife’s slowly fading beauty will lead her husband to abandon her for a younger mate. The specialization of this obsession is a fertile soil for the movie to explore a broader and more universal theme of paranoia, with lots of different textures. Seon-hee’s fears may be totally unfounded, or they may be only partly true; she might be losing her mind due to out-of-control suspicions arising from neglect by her workaholic husband, or she might be the victim of a supernatural conspiracy to take her spouse from her and destroy the family structure. The audience is kept off balance about whom they should fear: Seon-hee, the paranoid wife, or Mi-ok, the seemingly innocent young maid who carries a bundled-up shaman’s doll everywhere. There are enough hints of supernatural agency—such as the appearance of a slide depicting the frowning doll in the lepidopterist’s presentation before the totem actually appears in the story—to make the audience wonder if the source of the disorder is witchcraft, insanity, or gaslighting.
Mi-ok’s coquettish expressions are good, finding the right guise of uncertainty midway between genuine simplicity and a cunning mask. The younger girl is frequently shown standing above the wife in the frame, on the balcony looking down on her older counterpart, to emphasize her recent ascendancy in the household. Her body is exploited—she has frequent nude scenes and upskirt shots—but the twist is that she’s the object of the female gaze, not the male. The husband barely gives the girl a second glance; it’s the wife’s eyes that linger on her exposed flesh, burning not with lust but with envy.
If you favor the use of a fractured camera to depict the disintegration of the female mind, you’re in luck: it seems like about ten percent of the film is shot through a kaleidoscope. Once, a kaleidoscopic dream is superimposed on an image of Seon-hee fitfully sleeping, a great effect. Other shots are distorted by the simple but effective trick of affixing a thick water glass to the lens, sometimes adding a green and/or red filter to the mix. The result is a disorienting visual mix where significant objects—the doll—appear rotating inside a shard swirling in a morass of psychedelic colors. Mixed with the female paranoia, the colorfully cockeyed visuals give the film a distinct giallo feel, with a Korean flair (a character descended from the “Sea God’s grandmother” is an exotic non-European element). The ending is too literal for my tastes, but features plenty of cathartic destruction. Suddenly in the Dark never made its way past Korea’s borders in its initial run, but it makes us wonder what other minor treasures may be hiding in the vaults of cinema’s outer rim.
An interview with the producer in the extras reveals that a remake is planned. The film itself is heavily influenced by the 1960 Korean drama/thriller The Housemaid, in which a seductive maid disrupts the balance of a happy family.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE FOX FAMILY (2006)
Gumiho Gajok
DIRECTED BY: Hyung-gon Lee
FEATURING: Si-Yeon Park, Hyeon Ju, Jung-woo Ha, Jun Gyu Park, Ju-yeon Ko, Cheol-min Park
PLOT: A family of foxes pose as circus performers; if they can eat a human liver on the lunar eclipse, they will become human for good.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not especially weird. This is one of those fantasy films whose strangeness to Westerners stems mainly from different cultural expectations.
COMMENTS: “Where can we find a lot of humans?” asks the clueless Fox patriarch at a lonely gas station as the clan makes its way from the mountains to the city. The family of four is actually centuries old, but they’ve been living as kumiho—mischievous shapeshifting fox spirits—in the mountains. According to this movie’s spin on the ancient mythology, if they devour a person’s liver on the night of the lunar eclipse, they can become human forever. Unfortunately for this particular family, they are (mostly) sweet-natured yokels who are completely at sea when it comes to human society. They can’t even seduce lonely humans, supposedly the specialty of kumiho. The brother’s spastic dance floor moves get him ejected from the club, and the sister can’t fathom why her striptease doesn’t work on a particular subway patron. Still, it would be hard for them not to eventually bumble into a victim or two—except for the fact that they unwisely trust a con man who develops a scheme to protect his fellow humans (and save his own liver) while exploiting the clan.
There is a temptation to classify The Fox Family as a black comedy because of scenes like the one where a homicide detective absentmindedly scratches his head with a severed arm he finds at a grisly crime scene; yet, overall the tone is sweet, and even family-friendly. Even the con-artist is a pussycat at heart. The only features that give The Fox Family a whiff of weirdness are the musical numbers. They are mostly love songs from Si-Yeon Park—a South Korean model who is one of the world’s most beautiful women—although each member of the clan gets a moment in the spotlight. The only bizarre show-stopper is the trip to recruit victims—er, circus performers—at a camp for the homeless. Somehow, they dance their way into a complete different musical number, a Sharks vs. Jets vs. riot police style dance-off, complete with 1984-vintage breakdancing. This one scene may make the film worth a view for fans of Asian dementia.
If you want to understand why this film isn’t really weird, just use your imagination to change the fox spirits to something more Western (say, werewolves) and recast it with Hollywood stars: Danny DeVito as the father, Anna Kendrick as the older sister, Jim Carrey as the brother, and for the cutie pie younger daughter—are there any Fanning sisters left? Suddenly, what we have isn’t a weird movie, but a light comedy with blockbuster potential. Although you would have to ditch those musical numbers.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Kat,” who described it as “Shape shifting fox spirits, a street riot that becomes a dance off and the oddest use of a Wonder Woman costume I’ve ever seen [and I’ve seen some odd ones!]. You can’t go wrong really.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
LIST CANDIDATE: THE ISLE [SEOM] (2000)
DIRECTED BY: Ki-duk Kim
FEATURING: Jung Suh, Yoosuk Kim
PLOT: A mute woman who runs a fishing resort becomes obsessed with a suicidal fugitive hiding out in one of the floating cabins.
![Still from The Isle [Seom] (2000)](https://i0.wp.com/366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/the_isle_seom.jpg?resize=450%2C260)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s a bizarre, perverted sadomasochistic love story in a unique setting, made with skill and a few touches of surrealism.
COMMENTS: One of the most unique features of The Isle is the peculiar setting: a fishing resort on a picture-postcard lake dotted with one-room floating cabins for rent. Guests spend their days drinking beer, staring at the misty mountains in the distance, and fishing off their doorstep; while there they are almost completely dependent on the stunningly beautiful, mute proprietress, who ferries them back and forth to the shore and delivers bait, coffee, and prostitutes in her dinghy. (The hideaway appears to make more money off of escort services and wealthy men sailing their mistresses out to a bungalow for some floating hanky-panky than it does off of fishing). One day, the woman pilots a quiet, handsome man out to the yellow float; he catches her eye when she discovers that he is suicidal and has sailed out to the lake to work up the courage to bump himself off. This is the setup for a very odd romance that develops between two lovers with tormented pasts—backstories that are never fully explained but are hinted at by the obsessive fury with which they fall for each other and the self-loathing ferocity with which they mutilate themselves.
For a romantic drama, The Isle has a relatively high body count; but, despite a few horrific moments, no one will confuse this arthouse effort with a slasher. The tone is always straightforward and serious—even solemn—and this matter-of-fact treatment makes some of the bizarre occurrences near the end seem almost believable. The aquatic setting supplies a built-in metaphor for submerged meanings and hidden psychological depths, and beautifully murky underwater shots abound. Particularly lovely is a shot where Jung Suh, whose character moves above and below the waterline at will, peers down into the fathoms while her long jet black hair floats like seaweed behind her. Other strange and memorable moments include what is likely to be the most improbable and painfully gruesome suicide attempt you’ve ever seen, and a mysteriously surreal parting shot of a bushy island of green reeds. Evoking the mysterious power of mutually destructive attraction, The Isle is a movie that just might get its hooks in you—although hopefully not as literally as it gets its hooks inside its characters.
Fair warning to animal lovers: it does not appear that the Korean chapter of PETA was allowed on set for this shoot, as violence against vertebrates is a running theme in the film. The Isle features a frog skinned and pulled apart, sushi made and eaten from a living fish as it flops around, a drowned bird, and a dog choked by a leash and struck. Although some of the cruelty is faked, some of it clearly is not.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Spass.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: THE DAY HE ARRIVES (2011)
DIRECTED BY: Sang-soo Hong
FEATURING: Jun-Sang Yu, Bo-kyung Kim, Sang Jung Kim
PLOT: A director who no longer makes movies arrives in Seoul to touch bases with an old friend; he gets drunk, meets various acquaintances and colleagues, and then situations start to repeat themselves, with variations.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s got a subtly weird edge to it, but like its protagonist the film is too meandering and listless to demand more than our temporary interest.
COMMENTS: The Day He Arrives probably resembles nothing so much as a series of hazy recollections of a blackout drinking binge, where events keep getting jumbled up and you can’t remember whether it was Monday of Tuesday night when you mashed faces with that waitress in the alley, or even whether it really happened or you just wanted it to. The story starts with film director Sungjoon arriving in Seoul to meet an old friend; he’s stood up, but he encounters an actress he used to know, spends an evening getting drunk with three films students, then makes his way to the apartment of an ex-girlfriend to make a pathetic, teary pass at her. The next day (at least, we assume its the next day) he meets the same actress again, then meets up with his friend. They go to a bar with the friend’s girlfriend for a night of drinking, and are joined by the bar’s owner, who looks exactly like the girlfriend whose apartment the director just left the night before with promises that they would never meet again. From this point on, events in the story begin repeating themselves, but with variations. Every day, Sungjoon runs into the actress again on the street, and every night he and his friend return to the bar (ironically called “Novel”), sometimes joined by a new companion. Lines of dialogue and events repeat themselves, and characters we’ve seen interacting together before act as if they’ve never met. Each time Sungoon accidentally bumps into the actress on the street, however, they remember their last conversation, implying a chronologically continuity at odds with the fugue-like repetitions of the barroom scenes. After going on like this for a little while, the film ends arbitraily. Overall, Day paints a portrait of a man adrift in the world, a man who’s smart and observant yet doomed to make the same mistakes over and over. He’s a lost soul, but in an extremely polite and genteel way. The Day He Arrives is unique, but it inevitably evokes comparisons to many previous movies, from Last Year in Marienbad to Groundhog Day to (thanks to the actress playing dual roles) Vertigo. With its dramatic relationship basis enhanced by curious narrative experiments whose significance is not at all clear, it’s also reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s recent Certified Copy. Of those two films, I preferred Day, because it’s more economical (i.e. shorter) and it has a better sense of humor than the often self-important Copy. I suspect anyone who liked the one will respond well to the other. Both movies appear aimed at sophisticated viewers who consider subtlety an unconditional virtue. I can’t say I subscribe to that view: I prefer movies that transcend the mundane rather than wallowing in it, movies with a “wow” factor. Lacking that, a movie should at least offer an engaging plot, characters I can care about, or a stimulating intellectual idea to mull over; this movie makes a stab only at the last of these criteria. The Day He Arrives never gets around to suggesting what it’s about (which isn’t necessarily a problem); it also never makes a case as to why we should care (which is a problem).
Sang-soo Hong’s movies all feature lots and lots of drinking. If his hour-long interview included on the Day He Arrives is to be believed, his cinematic depictions of marathon drinking bouts come from personal experience.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: