Review: Ab-Normal Beauty

Disappointing 2004 film from Oxide Pang (“The Eye”, which he co-directed with his more conventionally named brother Danny) stars Race Wong as Jin, an acclaimed student photographer with a recent fascination with photographing death- dead animals and even suicide jumpers. This makes her girlfriend (Roseanne Wong) somewhat uneasy, as does the constant interest fellow student Leung keeps showing in her. Then someone starts sending her videotapes of a girl being tortured, and poor Jin starts to go a little bonkers. Add an absent mother, and production design that increasingly resembles “Saw”, and Bob’s your cross-dressing, monkey butt-lovin’ Uncle (Sorry Uncle Bob, I was only kidding!).

 

Takes its time, presumably to build characters, but nothing of interest really happens in this film, not even a lesbian love scene for crying out loud. What’s up with that? The film has an interesting colour scheme mixing greys with bright colours, so you can just sit and gawk at the screen and forget that there’s a major flaw in the film’s central relationship and very little plot at all (Some have suggested the film has a plot switcheroo towards the end, but I prefer to think of it as a belated appearance by the plot in the final third). Eventually it turns into a “Saw” rip-off, with a conclusion/mystery that (thanks to a small cast) one doesn’t really care much about.

 

The girls are pretty (and sisters, strangely enough…), and although somewhat unpleasant, Race Wong makes for an unusual heroine. It’s just never as interesting as it initially sounds, unless scenes of photographic development or hints of child abuse tickle your fancy, or if (unlike me), you’re not yet sick of “Ringu”-era Asian horror. The screenplay is by the director, who should have fired the writer, or asked him to see “A Tale of Two Sisters”, to see how to do this kind of thing considerably better (and hey, then the Wong’s could’ve actually played sisters, perhaps?).

 

Rating: C