MOEBIUS (Kim Ki-duk). 89 minutes. Opens Friday (September 26). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: N
Moebius is the latest offering from Kim Ki-duk, the Korean psychosexual extremist who’s given us such self-conscious provocations as The Isle, Bad Guy and Pieta.
This one’s a ponderous, preposterous drama about a father (Cho Jaye-hwon) and son (Seo Young-ju) undone by infidelity, mutilation, perversion and shame.
Kim tweaks his usual mixture of genital-centric horror and slow-motion sadism by depriving his characters of dialogue – the actors must emote through stern looks, grunts and the occasional scream – and, for no evident reason, by having Lee Eun-woo play both Cho’s manhood-obsessed wife and his empathetic mistress. Maybe she’s the only actor who could fall backward while flashing her underwear in precisely the way Kim liked.
A subplot involving various unmanned characters who practise a pain-based form of masturbation briefly offers an intriguing, Cronenbergian angle on the story, but Kim repeats it so often it becomes too silly to take seriously.