Twitch

Jiney is a young art school student raised by a largely absent – both emotionally and physically – mother. Her art, particularly her photography, has won her the acclaim of both her peers and her professors but it leaves her feeling cold. She is unsatisfied with her own work and holds it largely in contempt until she happens upon a fatal car crash and, torn between revulsion and fascination, snaps a shot of a slain pedestrian. This morbid shot awakens some emotion within her and Jiney promptly proclaims this her ideal subject. She becomes increasingly obsessed with death, snapping shots of suicides and hiring butchers to slaughter animals on camera, until her fixation threatens to overwhelm her and she finally pulls away from the precipice. All seems well until someone anonymously leaves photographs and a video for her, photos and film that appear to be an actual killing staged and caught on camera specifically for her …

Gratuitous nudity, snuff films, an obsessive stalker or two, a lesbian love interest, childhood trauma … in his effort to shock the audience Oxide Pang stuffs a little bit of everything in here, but what he forgets is to give us a reason to care about the central character. In many ways the flaws in Ab-Normal Beauty mirror those of The Eye 2 – lots of eye candy but very little in the way of character.

The root of the problem lies with both the overly busy script, jumping from situation to situation without giving the characters any real time to breath, and with the cast. Despite somewhat slight scripts – a common problem for the Pangs – The Eye and Bangkok Dangerous both succeed incredibly well thanks to the subtle, textured performances of Angelica Lee and Pavarit Mongkolpisit respectively, but there is no comparable performance here. Rather than casting experienced actors up to the challenge of carrying the emotional load Pang has opted for a pair of completely inexperienced pop stars in the leads and though neither performance is particularly embarrassing both play things in the broadest possible strokes and ultimately strip the film of whatever emotional punch it may have had.

On the plus side the film is beautifully shot and edited. The Pang Brothers are a pair of the most technically accomplished film makers in the world and while that focus on technique can sometimes overwhelm their characters they simply shoot gorgeous film. There are breathtaking shots scattered throughout the film, the composition is flawless and the film is edited with punch and style. The only technical hiccup is the overly dramatic score which I suspect may have been punched up some in an effort to compensate for the rather emotionally flat performances. In terms of the film work Ab-Normal Beauty nestles up to The Eye 2 at the very top of the Pang Brothers pile but in over all impact it sits somewhere in the middle of the pack. I’ve not yet become as frustrated with The Pangs as I have with Japan’s Ryuhei Kitamura but they’d best come up with a decent script sometime soon if they don’t want to start bleeding away their global fan base …