Ab-Normal Beauty

Sometimes it seems that Asian horror is being remade and American-ized so much that it’s just not interesting anymore, but when you see one of these movies, in it’s original form, you realize why it’s such an amazing genre. I just had my Asian horror batteries recharged by watching a great horror movie, Ab-Normal Beauty.



Now, don’t think that this is the perfect horror movie, there are some flaws here, but if you can get past them, like I did, I think you’d enjoy it. Here’s the story: Jin is a schoolgirl whose hobby is photography, when she’s on the scene of a fatal car accident; Jin takes several pictures of the body lying in the street. This sets off an obsession with taking pictures of death and of things dying. We learn that this all stems from a childhood incident where Jin was sexually attacked by her cousin and his friends, this has left Jin afraid of boys and full of self-hatred. As Jin dives more and more deeply into her death obsession, her girlfriend (yes, she’s a Chinese lesbian!) starts to get worried. When Jin crosses a line and finds herself actually wanting to kill a male friend of hers, even she realizes that she’s about to cross a line that she won’t easily cross back from. Here’s where the problem I had with this movie cropped up, just as Jin has worked out her problem and seems to be on the way to turning around, video tapes begin appearing on her doorstep, tapes of girls being beaten and eventually killed. Who’s sending the tapes? The girls suspect only one person and he’s too quickly found innocent.

Ab-Normal Beauty is a good movie, but the end seems sort of tacked on. It doesn’t flow well with the rest of this riveting movie. The journey of Jin through the heart of darkness is compelling and great, but when we get into the last half hour, the movie seems to lose it’s way and, after a satisfying conclusion to Jin’s story, we’ve now been handed the mystery of the tapes!

I’m giving Ab-Normal Beauty two out of four cigars,
because, after watching it, I felt that I had seen a complete movie, plus a little, and the final revelation was less than exciting or satisfying for the audience. So, until next time, when I’ll tell you about the videos that have been showing up on my door…it’s not really a mystery, they’re from Netflix, remember that the best movies are bad movies!