Review of Ab-normal Beauty

Films about art and artists are of great interest to me, delvings into the relationship of image and imaginer, into the imagining itself and what change it wreaks on the two parties. Abnormal Beauty is then a film of interest to me and though it has little new or especially intelligent to say, it speaks with elegance and it speaks from the heart. Its central artist is the troubled Jin (Race Wong) who comes across a car crash and feels compelled to photograph it, in doing so reopening cracks of childhood trauma, widening them to deathly obsession, morbid sensuality and danger. Much of the film is dark psychological drama rather than horror, the whole visual scheme mirroring Jin's descent. Shots are still, sparsely composed and sometimes richly tinted, an imagery of bleak yearning, of the cameras power to make beauty from from death, to bring something from nothing and yet in the freezing of image eternally condemn, forever sequester from reality. All this perhaps the highlight of the film, its thoughts internalised speaking with so much more eloquence than the occasional fragments of exposition. Its powerfully acted stuff too, Race Wong subtly moving, quietly pained, she does well in suggesting character shadows. Her real life sister Rosanne plays (in a slightly perverse bit of casting), her girlfriend Jas, though the lesbian currents are pretty restrained. Another fine turn, possessive and emotionally fraught, the extrovert half of the two. Anson Leung is good too as a classmate of Jin innocently drawn to her. All cylinders fire pretty well it must be said, things reaching an emotional climax around two thirds of the way through as Jin heads towards her precipice. Then the film switches gears to head for real horror in its climax, a move that works thematically but not so much dramatically. Quite simply it's a lop sided film, what should be a thought out second half becomes a climax instead and ends up feeling more of an undernourished epilogue than the savage gut punch it aims for. In more general terms the film suffers from being somewhat restrained as well, some will no doubt praise its subtlety but the story is a bit too lurid for restraint to really work. There's too little actual threat, the menace being predictably largely of the mind, and too little pointed exploration, for a film too restrained to go mad it doesn't help itself by being intellectually undercooked. In a film so concerned with dark aesthetics and the break from normality there's comically little treatment of the related moral issues and the general psychological fall out follows standard plotting lines rather than great insight. Still, this is a pretty fine film despite its ills. Its a film to submit to and swim around in, to abandon oneself to the leads and drink in their sights, sorrow to their sorrows. Truth be told it was only after viewing that the films flaws started to fall into place, its such a well oiled beast (and more to the point, looks so goddarned pretty) that I was almost captivated for most of the run time. As such I recommend it if you like your Asian horror slow and artful, some I'm sure may like it more than me. But it certainly isn't the latter day underrated classic some have hailed it as. 7/10