Okay… Right…Okay. How about… No, that won’t do. What if… No, that won’t do either. I pace up and down thinking up a way to properly convey the bizarre nature of this nutso South Korean drama and the best I can come up with is this: It’s the kind of film where your girlfriend, a dead ringer for your mother, can stick a switchblade into her rapist’s shoulder and that can be seen as some kind of infidelity.
When she learns of his cheating the incensed Lee Eun-woo, fuelled by jealousy and alcohol, takes a kitchen knife to husband Cho Jae-hyeon’s penis. When easily foiled by her strong husband, she instead exacts that revenge on their son, Seo Young-ju. And then eats it. Guilty over causing this trauma, Cho researches a penis transplant between him and his castrated son while Seo embarks on a bizarre pleasure/pain affair with his father’s mistress (also played by Lee), but only after engaging in her gang rape. And that’s where things get a little weird… Oh, and did I mention that all of this happens without any dialogue? Sorry, should have mentioned that little nugget.
Reading that, it’ll come as no surprise that this psycho-sexual drama that explores incest by nasty characters is from Ki-duk Kim whose last outing was the equally disturbing and similarly themed Pieta. But Moebius goes to places Pieta wouldn’t dare. There’s the way son is disgusted with dad because dad receives an emasculating kicking from bullying teens. There’s the way dad could easily overpower mum’s attacks when he sported the appendage in question, but is brushed aside effortlessly when he’s, erm, without. And there’s the way that mum now wants to, erm, with son because he now sports dad’s… erm…
I can’t go into the whole knife-shoulder-orgasm-mum lookalike affair-thing as, well, where does one start? All I can say is that it’s unlikely to be forgotten about any time soon. Just like hastily-assembled looking student film sets that at first jar but then tap into the otherworldliness of the story, Moebius, against the odds and despite itself, works. But where does Kim Ki-duk go from here?
