Moebius (2013)

Director: Kim Ki-duk
Writer:    Kim Ki-duk
Cast:       Jae-hyeon Jo, Eun-woo Lee, Young-ju Seo
Language: Korean?

The film centers around a family consisting of a father, mother, their son and the father's much younger mistress. The mother and son finds about the father's infidelity. The psychotic mother tries to cut off her husband's penis but when foiled she proceeds to cut her son's dick off. She leaves them and the father feeling guilty and solidarity towards his son, surgically removes his penis. The film then follows them experimenting with their situation as it kind of become a menage-a-quatre. To nobody's surprise you have to bring the Freudian influence and call it a drama dealing with Freudian castration anxiety and the phallic stage of development with a dose of Oedipus complex.

Its been a while since I have seen a Kim Ki-duk film. Moebius along with Pieta has been sitting in my hard disk for a while and I didn't get around to watching them since I was not sure about the subtitle. Turns out that it didn't need a subtitle because the film is entirely unspoken and I think there is not even a background score. I saw an article today in Dailybeast describing it as the most fucked up film of the year and that is all the trigger I needed to finally end up watching it. It certainly lived up to the expectations.

Generally Kim Ki-duk films are disturbing but great one-time watches. All of them have sequences that are very difficult to watch but Moebius takes it to a different level because the film is full of them. Despite this, like most of the other Kim Ki-dum films, it is an extremely black- black comedy. You can't help but laugh at some of the turns that the story takes even as Kim Ki-duk answers the questions one might have about this situation regarding urination, ejaculation etc one by one. I don't know how scientific and accurate his portrayal is but it certainly is interesting enough. I didn't realize that Eun-woo Lee herself played the roles of both the wife and the mistress. She certainly looked very different. Noticed one scene which certainly was a homage to 3-Iron.

It is certainly not recommended for faint-hearted people. But if you are fan of Kim Ki-duk then it is certainly worth checking out. The fact that there are no dialogs make it even more powerful. Kim Ki-duk was in Kerala last year for the Kerala film festival. Wonder whether this was screened in it. Probably not because it was even banned initially in South Korea but later the censor board gave it the go ahead.

Rating: 3.5/5