High art horror? It can happen. Acacia is proof of nothing less. Park Ki-hyeong's slow-burn psychodrama about a middle-aged couple who adopt an autistic boy (Mun Oh-bin) is simultaneously an avant garde portrait of middle-class ennui with its prolonged silences of estrangement and its sinisterly surrealist touches and a typical Saturday afternoon chiller with spooky music, sudden camera lurches, and a building body count. Neither approach feels at cross purposes with the other since Park is committed to both in full. Sure, he'll have the psychotic mother (Shim Hye-jin) wield scissors against her husband (Kim Jin-geun) but he'll also have her do it in a living room that she's converted into an art installation of red yarn. Why shouldn't life be acted out amid a gallery's worth of symbols? By the final climax, during which two murders -- one present; one past -- are revealed, Acacia has so effectively grafted its two opposing genres together that you accept the tree in the backyard as a harmless plant that the crazies have laden with meaning and as an evil force incapable of mercy. No interpretation is wrong. Freezeframe the Munch-like drawings by the precocious orphan if you're looking for further explanation.
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That sounds amazing! Did you oversell it? It really sounds so interesting and good.
ReplyDeleteI guess it depends on whether you like your horror with alot of still moments and without much screaming.
ReplyDeleteeven IIII want to see this film - and i hate horror.
ReplyDeleteplus, it's not too scary so maybe you SHOULD see it
ReplyDelete