January 3, 2009

Acacia: When the Bough Breaks the Family Will Fall


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.

4 comments:

  1. That sounds amazing! Did you oversell it? It really sounds so interesting and good.

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  2. I guess it depends on whether you like your horror with alot of still moments and without much screaming.

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  3. even IIII want to see this film - and i hate horror.

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  4. plus, it's not too scary so maybe you SHOULD see it

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