Three Extremes

Three Extremes comes to us from Asia as a collection of three shorts by some of the most notorious and acclaimed directors who have graced genre filmmaking. This collection is also head and shoulders above the original “three” release which contained an enjoyable story set in a tenement building sandwiched in with two absolutely unremarkable shorts.

Chan Wook Park comes from the type of country in which old fashioned eye for an eye retribution is still commonplace, so he has dedicated his first trio of films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for lady Vengeance) to deglamorizing revenge with a healthy dose of Greek tragedy as inspiration. Cut, his entry into this trio of shorts follows along these lines but pushes his style further into the area of satire. A disgruntled extra kidnaps a wealthy director and forces him to play a sick morality game he’s devised. In order to save his wife from a slow, painful mutilation the seemingly faultless director must prove that he is capable of evil as well. The short continues to jump around between gore and hilarity making it easily the most extreme of this trio, but its extra inning is even more disappointing than the one in oldboy. Visually this short is a triumph for Chan Wook Park though, he get’s to play with some low budget but clever enough computer generated effects and the set this evil little play was staged on would make the producers of Saw proud.

The second short, Dumplings, was a huge surprise for me. You see Fruit Chan is the one director I was not aware of before watching this movie so a glance over his resume had me expecting a slasher film as his entry. I couldn’t be more wrong of course… this short is a carefully paced pot boiler filled with gruesome culinary atrocities. An aging actress fearing for her trophy wife status is forced to seek out a cook reputed for making dumplings that reverse the effects of time. Even though the horrifying secret ingredient is revealed early on what makes this short truly disturbing is the apathy it is approached with. Along the way Fruit Chan offers up some amazing cinematography and Bai Ling’s role as a REALLY old fashioned chef adds extra depth to the film. My favorite element in the way it plays with the viewers sentiments since it makes it hard to decide whether Bai Ling’s character is in fact a feminist hero or a selfish ghoul. 

The third and last short is brought by Takashi Miike; one of the most prolific directors in the world who completes movie and TV projects every few months. Also his body of work is extremely varied, although most of his notoriety comes from his more surreal and hyper violent movies. That’s why I was shocked to learn that Box is in fact a slow and pretty perfume commercial of a horror short. Switching gears to a palette of blue, gold and snow, Miike leads us through a maze of suffocating and terrifying dreams within dreams that the protagonist, an eccentric young writer, must endure. The script itself evokes some of Edgar Allen Poe’s favorite themes, loners eternally haunted not by ghosts and monsters, but by grief and guilt. Also fascinating is the restraint he showed when directing this short, the gore is minimal and even the infinitely disturbing child abuse elements are handled tastefully.