Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
I think everyone, more or less, is affected by ideas of death. You can be repelled by it, fearful of it, anxious for it, curious about it, or compelled, but at some level, we’re all going to have to face thoughts of it at one time or another. It’s healthy to deal with it, but it’s also really easy for it to become an obsession, either faked (like many a goth) or real—and the real obsession can end up getting dangerous. A film like Ab-Normal Beauty (or Sei mong se jun in the original Cantonese) explores that idea, both in terms of fascination with death and dangerous obsession with it.
Jiney (Race Wong) is an award-winning art student, but despite all of the acclaim that she receives, she is unhappy with her work. No amount of praise from fellow student Anson (Anson Leung) will help her feel better about herself, and her roommate/girlfriend Jas (Race Wong’s real-life sister Rosanne Wong) tries to help her get her mind off of her disappointment in her work. When Jiney witnesses a fatal car accident, she uses the opportunity to start snapping pictures and finds herself drawn to these images of death.
This is an obsession that starts to build and begins to take over the bulk of her photography. She starts snapping pictures of dead birds and a man slaughtering chickens. In her art classes, she starts adding blood to paintings of models, creating a sense of violence and death where there isn’t one normally. She hangs off her balcony, seemingly inviting death, and makes a series of photographs of a young woman committing suicide by jumping off a tall building.
The death obsession is naturally something that starts to bother everyone around her, and with some effort, Jiney starts to move away from what she is drawn to paint and photograph. And then she receives a video tape that appears to be a snuff film of a young woman being tortured and beaten to death. Neither she nor Jas can figure out if it is real, but both assume it is a prank being played on them by Anson. But Anson proves to be unaware of what is happening, which creates the very real possibility that what Jiney has received is the real thing.
Ab-Normal Beauty takes a long time to tell the story it wants to. There’s a good hour or so of film that is essentially just Jiney’s growing obsession with death and images of death. It also seems to break a cardinal rule of this sort of thriller in that when we ultimately discover the identity of the person who is sending Jiney the tapes, there is a way that it ultimately makes sense, but is someone who is so tangential to the bulk of the story that it seems like a cheat getting there.
The real reason to pay attention to Ab-Normal Beauty is that it goes out of its way to give us some really beautiful imagery. This is a film that feels art directed within an inch of its life. In some respects, it feels like a giallo in that it frequently feels like the image on screen is far more important than the actual content of the story or the overarching plot.
That said, the film has to go out of its way to give us that imagery because it doesn’t give us a great deal of plot for a large part of its running time. We’re going to get a lot of artistic shots of dead birds, of the woman standing on a rooftop, and of a man strangling chickens, but surprisingly little regarding moving the plot forward for about the first hour. It’s all death obsession without any real meat up to that point.
Because of that, this isn’t the easiest film to recommend for anyone who isn’t really excited by the prospect of an art film involving what may be a snuff film. It’s a hard sell, that.
There are a few films I have seen that plunge into those particular waters (I’m talking here about movies that include snuff films as a plot point), and for the most part I find them unpleasant. Mute Witness might be the rare exception to that. I suppose this one is, too. It’s not a film I want to tell others to run out and watch, but it is certainly pretty to look at. The ending feels like kind of a cheat, though, and it’s a long time getting there. If you do decide to strap into this one, know what you’re getting into.
Why to watch Ab-Normal Beauty: Like it or not, death is kind of fascinating.
Why not to watch: Anything that touches on snuff films is going to be upsetting.
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