Movies With Butter

With a cue from Mike Figgis and the digital revolution (oh, the handheld video and the synth tracks), South Korean provocateur Kim Ki-Duk has returned to his bent comedies with Moebius, a perverse parable about family, sex and death—three subjects that get icky if you stick with them long enough.

Much like Ki-Duk’s beloved 3 Iron, Moebius is dialogue-free and the conflicts couldn’t benefit from talking anyway. A cheating father destroys his wife, while his son, who hears the screwing from his front porch, ambles towards self-pleasure. As retribution, mother tries to excise the appendage that causes her torment, but her husband is too strong, and she takes an appendage from the son. The story grows increasingly violent and grim after the Oedipal escapades begin.

We all agree: sex is confusing. Thank God it's only this confusing when Kim Ki-Duk is involved.

If you’re looking for the point in the loop where the end and beginning meet, you’ll have to look hard, which isn’t easy because everything is smeared with a patina of grody, from the implied incest to gang rape to genital dismemberment. But the film mines a dark quadrant of our psyches: just how much are we like our parents? Sure it’s all sweet and charming to compare noses when kids are young but after adolescence, I think we’d all prefer not to know precisely how we’re like our parents.

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