trung together with recurring motifs of desperation and vengeance while gleefully indulging in the Grand Guignol grotesquerie so endemic to a certain breed of recent East Asian cinema, the shorts films compiled in Three…Extremes seem intent on both consolidating and reinventing this quasi-genre they are packaged together to typify. Anthology films are strange eggs—the cumulative effect of grouping and viewing individual films as of a piece rather than as separate entities can yield a curious and often unsatisfactory alloy, ranging from the middling (Eros) to the disastrous (Four Rooms). Three Extremes is, on its surface, an anthology of nasty brutish little horror stories, but watching these films pull and strain at the restrictions imposed by the form and reputation of what Asian Extreme should be, the films come to seem more like a summit meeting on the very genre they are supposed to represent. Trying to answer the inarticulate questions implicit in their unapologetically galling stories, all three seem to be pushing themselves to explore what lies beyond their visual shock tactics, what they are meant to reveal or point to (if anything) of the extremities of the soul. That the film (as a whole) refuses to offer cogent or satisfying answers is a testament to its strengths, the thorny ambiguity of each story's moral quandaries complementing the complexities of a film addressing the very nature of its genre.

All this meta-filmic and sophomoric philosophical blather aside, Three Extremes actually DOES hold up its end of the bargain as a straight up horror film. Batting leadoff, Fruit Chan's queasily shocking Dumplings, a paring down of a longer film, seems hell-bent on separating the wheat from the chaff audience-wise—anyone who can stomach this sick little riff on Dorian Grey will have no problem with what follows, but expect the attrition rate in whatever theater you are in to be high, especially if it's an unsuspecting audience. A fading actress seeking to reclaim her past glory and her husband's affection avails herself of the services of a local woman whose homemade dumplings are famous for restoring youth and vitality. The key ingredient (which it would be a crime to reveal here) isn't so unsettling as the desperate necessity that drives the actress and the ultimate relish she finds in her sustenance, even at the cost of her very womanhood.

Linked aurally with Dumplings by a genuinely disquieting crunch of mastication, Chan-wook Park's Cut fades in with an apparent vampire feeding on a frozen corpse. A terrific fake-out of a scene, Park keeps draws the camera back after about five minutes to reveal a soundstage, and a director closing up shop for the night—sorry, no vampires here kids, though the blood will flow freely and copiously soon enough. What follows is considerably more troubling, as the director arrives home (in which his living room is identical to the one on the soundstage, though the significance of this is never commented upon), is subdued by an intruder, and awakens to find himself tethered to a wall back at the soundstage. His tormentor, a disgruntled extra, has also kidnapped the director's wife and strung her up like a marionette at a piano, threatening to cut off her fingers if the director does not comply with his (the actor's) increasingly sadistic demands. Another baroque morality play revolving around the twin foci of guilt and vengeance, Park's Cut reveals a director single-mindedly obsessed with characters plagued by desperate single-minded obsession. As in Oldboy, ideas of sin and justice are sprung completely loose from their moorings—traditional moral guideposts are obliterated and revenge becomes the end of itself, completely divorced from any real crimes (indeed, the director's sins here are what he hasn't done). Park seems to be grasping for some ultimate revelation in the film's confusing final frames, but trying to unravel its knotty conundrums yields little but more questions (which I guess is the entire point). Intense but ultimately undercut by its own narrative slipperiness, Cut seems more a footnote to Park's own Vengeance Trilogy than a fully realized idea, perhaps a left over segment that didn't fit into any of his other films.


Even more puzzling, though, is Takashi Miike's enigmatic and elliptical entry, Box, the most intriguing and least satisfying of the three. Reining in his trademark manic stylistic brio and completely eschewing the vile celebrations of human depravity upon which he's built his infamy, Miike's restraint is perhaps the biggest shock of the entirety of Three Extremes. But for him, reinventing himself with this style of elegant formalism qualifies as an extreme for a director who has made his career out of nothing but extremity. A sad little tale of sin, suppressed guilt, and (surprise) revenge, Box finds a young woman seeking forgiveness for a horrible crime she committed against her sister and father, an atonement she may or may not have found in the film's utterly confounding coda. Claustrophobic and desolate, lyrical and impressionistic, a film where memory bleeds into dream bleeds into reality and back into memory, Box is entirely opaque and unyielding, a film that feels at once tragically incomplete and also so hermetically sealed as to utterly discourage any future revision. It's a puzzle box, and you have the feeling that something profound lurks within if only you could slide the pieces in the right order and unlock it.

And yet Miike stands here at the end pointing the way, for himself and for his peers scattered about Asia, even if he's directing them towards somewhere shrouded in darkness and as yet unknowable. Box may be not only a transition film for himself, but might serve as a conduit for potential metamorphosis of this entire sub-genre of Asian cinema. Teetering on the brink of absolute nihilism, perhaps these directors are here pulling themselves back, or pushing themselves through, seeking to rebuild upon the ruins of what they've razed with their cinema of tastelessness and outrage. Three Extremes is three steps in that direction.