Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if your mother cut off your penis in a fit of jealous rage? Director Kim Ki-duk has, and he’s made it into a film called Moebius for us to enjoy. It’s provocative, to say the least.
Aware of her husband’s affair, the mother of the main family (none of the characters are named in the film) attempts to castrate him. When that plan backfires, she does the next ‘best’ thing and turns her blade’s attentions to their teenage son before, and bear with it, eating the unfortunate member and absconding.
Then the film gets weird.
The son and father are forced together more through dependence and guilt respectively than any sort of familial love. The father attempts to find a solution to this problem first by looking into transplants, then, recognising the unfeasibility of this, finds new ways (involving rocks and cringe-worthy tissue damage) for the son to achieve orgasm sans organ.
Meanwhile the son suffers multiple public humiliations (though it did raise the question ‘if you’re not all intact down there, why are you going to public urinals rather than cubicles?’ It’ll only end in tears…), gets forced into a group rape, goes to prison for a related crime and suffers during the climax (in both senses) emotional agony to match the physical equivalent he’s endured through the prior eighty minutes.
If you’ve made it this far through the description of insanity contained in Moebius, then you’ll probably safely make it through the actual film. Save for a bloody finale, any such gore is kept to a minimum throughout, a significant choice considering the possibilities afforded by such an extreme plot.
By starting from such a superlative point and maintaining that heightened tone throughout, Moebius ensures the audience is made to seriously ruminate while watching. If it progressively built to an explicit crescendo, one’s focus would be diverted from anything else to focus on the viscera. The time you spend awkwardly turning from the screen you spend contemplating, a praise one can rarely attach to a film that’s most romantic and sensual sex scene involves judicious knife usage.
An additional pertinent and admirable quality is that the Moebius features zero dialogue. Many moans and shrieks, yes, but no spoken words. Had I not known it was a dialogue-free film going in, the fact would barely register for two reasons. Firstly, there is not a point made of it, unlike in The Artist, where the absence of sound was its central conceit rather than an additional facet. Secondly, everything necessary to the story was more than adequately conveyed without dialogue, and it removed any risk of hackneyed and obvious rhetorical clichés.
It provided a lightness of touch to the film, and I’m actually advocating more films ditch the dialogue, as there are a disappointing number of films where speech is rarely done well to the point of superfluousness.
Operating in a world striving to be more symbolic than realist, while otherwise sharingall the traits of reality, Moebius is probably best described as some form of surreal melodrama, where all emotion is heightened to ludicrous extremes. Yet it doesn’t feel exploitative; it’s just a hell of human existence. It’s nihilistically dark while never feeling oppressive.
This nihilism is given levity by some of the blackest comedy I’ve ever witnessed, perhaps personified in a scene where two castrated individuals scrap in the street over a dismembered member only for it to get the Mrs Doubtfire treatment. Without this level of humour (admittedly, often supplied through the same extremism as the horrific elements,) Moebius would be a slog. With it, it’s the most consistently original, enjoyable and thought provoking film since Nymphomaniac Part 1.
The biggest tragedy of the whole thing is films like The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film get far more attention. This imperfect masterpiece is just as disturbing, if just conceptually rather than visually (likely the reason it will be overlooked in favour of other such extreme cinema), only it has something to say. It is provocative to the brain rather than the gag reflex. Though don’t be mistaken, it’s uncomfortable in both capacities.
Tom Watchorn
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