Ab-normal Beauty

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Horrorphile - August 2007

Ab-normal Beauty

August 15th 2007 00:21

The Pang twin brothers, Oxide and Danny, are Hong Kong based filmmakers at the cutting edge of horror. Shame then that their blades are not as sharp as they’d like to think they are. The came to prominence with a series of low-budget, hyper-stylised movies, including The Eye (2002), an adaptation of Alex Garland’s novel The Tesseract (2003), a couple of sequels to The Eye, and this movie Ab-normal Beauty (2004). Currently The Eye is being remade by the French duo behind the ghost story Ils (2006) and will star Jessica Alba.

The twin brothers share all the main duties of writing, producing and directing, while Danny is also an established editor who cut the hugely successful Infernal Affairs films. With Ab-normal Beauty however Oxide enlisted his other brother Thomas to co-write the screenplay.

Race Wong as Jiney

Jiney (Race Wong) is a talented but oddly troubled Arts student. Her mother (Michelle Mee) neglects her and there is an incident from her childhood which lingers in her mind. Together with her girlfriend Jas (Rosanne Wong) they photograph the inner city’s architectural and natural beauty. When Jiney witnesses a nasty car crash she is driven by a morbid desire and photographs the dead victim. This leads to an overwhelming obsession with “capturing” death.

Jas tries to help Jiney in processing and purging this unhealthy, ab-normal compulsion. Jiney receives what appears to be a snuff video. The young women believe it to be a prank of their fellow student Anson (Anson Leung). Then another tape arrives encouraging them to investigate deeper.

Ab-normal Beauty Rosanne Wong and Race Wong

Rosanne Wong as Jas with Jiney in her darkroom

The premise is darkly interesting, but the movie never pays off with any true satisfaction. The main problem is the movie’s stylistics. Brilliant as they are, they also heavily detract from any real emotional and psychological involvement with the story and the characters. Don’t get me wrong though, I love movies that have a very distinct visual style. But “style” in a horror movie is a thin ice which a filmmaker must tap a delicate danse macabre upon. Too heavy and they fall into the ice cold waters of pretension.

Anson Leung as Anson

"With a scary movie, when the audience comes out of a theater, all that matters is whether it's scary," Oxide is quoted as saying. All well and good, but unfortunately he leaves me cold. I want to be affected and I’ve seen three of his movies, but none of them scared me. I enjoyed some of the tension, loved some of the imagery, but they just weren’t that creepy, certainly not as disturbing or unnerving as I had hoped for.

Oxide Pang worked as a colourist before becoming a director and this attention to detail is clearly evident in the Pang brothers’ movies. The use of light, colour and composition is often stunning. The use of editing and sound effects is also inventive and resonant. But this is also where the movie is trapped. The images, the mise-en-scene becomes too much like a music clip, or a fancy Asian resume.

The coloured shadows of the darkroom

Other films have treaded the waters through the ice they’ve fallen through, or even managed to avoid falling through altogether. Takashi Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto are two Japanese directors renowned for their overt, sometimes bombastic visual style. Chan-wook Park, the South Korean who directed the brilliant Oldboy is another audio-visual acrobat. These filmmakers manage to instill the raw emotion and empathy with their characters which Oxide Pang doesn’t seem quite as able to.

But more importantly, Ab-normal Beauty's finale simply doesn’t command the intense fear and horror necessary to punctuate the film with the disturbing denouement it requires. And the epilogue between Jiney and her mother is borderline risible.

Where a sharp knife glints, death follows

Ab-normal Beauty does possess a striking style; there is no doubt about that, and the performances are fine. But at the end of the night, that palpable element of fear and horror never placed its icy, bloody hand tight enough around my throat. Perhaps the movie simply looked too slick, too packaged, too contrived? The atmosphere dissipated by its own intensity.

Dario Argento is another director who makes heavily stylized movies, sometimes to the detriment of the story, yet for the most part he still injects that factor, which eludes the Pang brothers, which lifts the movie from being simply an exercise in visual bravado so that it becomes more an experience in abject horror.

Jiney paints it all red

Ab-normal Beauty has the dark and perverse aptitude, but it is simply too self-conscious as an art film to work effectively enough as a pure horror movie.

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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Comments

5 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Terry

August 15th 2007 03:20

MysTerry's Mansion
Theatre of the mind

Alot of these horror movies are hit and miss, I'm seen some good ones and some bad ones. My favorite to this day is [I]A Tale of Two Sisters/I], it is just creepy.

I notice alot of the overseas movies are being remade in America...mores the pity. Sometimes they just loose alot of what made them great.

Great review and I'll make sure to give it a pass at the movie rentals.

Hurdy Gur

Terry

Comment by Bryn

August 15th 2007 04:26

Horrorphile

The Pang brothers are either your cup of jasmine tea or not ... they could be yours, but they aren't really mine.

Comment by Nickoftime's Sanity Corner

August 15th 2007 15:19

Byrn,

The Pang Brothers to me don't seem to really get the art of true horror down as well as the could if they really tried...

But this is a great review!

Take care,

Nick

Comment by Bryn

August 16th 2007 03:01

Horrorphile

Nick, I quite agree! They've got surplus style, but slender supplies of the nitty gritty ....

Comment by D. Armenta

August 16th 2007 16:15

The Florida Keys and Everglades
The Black Sheep Chronicles
What constitutes bad manners?
The male mystique
Debate Fan
L.A.M.P.

Bryn,

You were dead on when you commented that the style is akin to a slick music video..my thoughts exactly! At first I thought I was tuned to MTV...

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