Oxide Pang Chun (of The Pang Brothers directorial team) steps out on his own to write and direct the startling visceral horror film Ab-Normal Beauty. The film is part character study, part social commentary, and part shock film. When art student Jiney (Race Wong) becomes obsessed with photographing death, her life spirals out of control. Shot with various photography-inspired filters and edited to represent the myriad of traditional photo lab techniques, Ab-Normal Beauty becomes an exploration of the international obsession with death on film.
Oxide Pang Chun is no stranger to commenting on and advancing the form of horror films. His collaboration with brother Danny Pang The Eye used all of the cliches of the haunted house film to comment on why ghost stories hold such power in so many cultures. Even the most old-fashioned technique was brought into a new context to make every scene far more terrifying and memorable than it had any right to be based on approach alone.
Ab-Normal Beauty raises the stakes in this style of filmmaking. Though the visual techniques are subtle and beautiful, the content is harsh and unyielding. Jiney is haunted by the memories of being abused by her older cousin when she was a child. Though the English subtitles use the phrase "bullying," it's quite clear by her refusal to spend any time with boys and men out of principle and the flashback sequences of the event that the actual cause is sexual abuse. The film sets up a revenge story hidden by the guise of a Repulsion-styled descent to madness character study layered in with grizzly shots of hyper-realistic death.
Take, for instance, a scene at a market. Jiney decides she is going to cook dinner for her best friend Jas while her mother is away on a business trip. They buy some broccoli, then debate whether to buy fish or shrimp for the main course. Jiney stops herself short when she sees a man slitting the throats of live chickens. The camera lingers on the writhing corpse in the bucket as Jiney starts paying the man to let her photograph the process over and over again.
It's horrifying because it's not what you expect to happen in a horror film. It's shot the same way that you would see a drunk teenager get attacked by a masked killer in a slasher film. The context and content are so different that you begin to question how a young woman like Jiney could be so obsessed with death. Then you step back and realize that Jiney's obsession with the slaughtered chickens is a parallel to cinema's obsession with death.
Don't people like me seek out scary films against the will of others? Doesn't someone almost always die in a shocking way? Even if death isn't the pull of the genre, it's the tool most often used to get to the actual horror. What does it say about film culture where we're at the point that a film can be made commenting on violent death in films that uses violent deaths in a beautiful film to open the discussion about its value in society?
Ab-Normal Beauty is not a perfect film. The last thirty minutes really belabor an unexpected stalking plotline. It could work as a short coda but seems unbearable after an hour of shocking violence and confusion. The idea is great and serves the concept of the film well; the execution is off. It's too slow and unbelievable in the face of everything that came before.
If this sequence had been split up and spread throughout the entire film, it would be perfect. It's too much of an addendum after the film has already made its point quite clear. It's also the most derivative section of the film. All of these ideas and scenes have been seen in other films that used them as the purpose of their film. It's Oxide Pang Chun's point. This level of violence is rarely necessary in film. It's just not as clear as it should be.
Here's what I know for sure. Ab-Normal Beauty features one of the most terrifying scenes I've ever seen in a film at about the halfway point. This is quite significant. It's the only scary scene in the film that does not use blood, violence, or horror cliches to get its point across. It is all suggestion, performance, direction, cinematography, and editing. If there is any argument to be made for the merit of gratuitous violence in cinema, the argument is lost when weighed against the shock value of something that plainly terrifying without a single drop of blood.
Rating: 7/10
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