Ab-normal Beauty Reviews

With their hats off to PEEPING TOM (1960), the Pang Brothers (THE EYE, BANGKOK DANGEROUS) express voyeuristic horrors that may leave some audiences queasy. Art-school student Jiney (Race Wong) takes solace in her photography studies and her Sapphic friendship with Jas (Rosanne Wong), yet neither love nor art really rock her world. One day, after witnessing a car accident, Jiney feels a surge of passion. Jas is appalled as Jiney explains the rush of photographing a dying crash victim. Unable to stifle her curiosity about death, Jiney pays a poultry shop owner to slit the throats of chickens while she snaps away. Each execution of these images pushes Jiney further away from her girlfriend and from normalcy. At school, Jiney keeps brushing off Anson (Anson Leung), a classmate as attached to his video camera as she is to her Nikon. Head over heels with a crush on her, Anson agrees to model for Jiney. In her quest for heightened imagery, Jiney splashes him with red paint and then threatens him at knifepoint. Unbeknownst to her, a homicidal admirer has been photographing her in homage to her emerging style. He begins sending Jiney depraved video recordings of a woman being savagely beaten to death. To her horror, she recognizes one of the victims on these S&M murder tapes, and Jiney realizes her obsession with death has attracted a psychopath who intends to have her star in his next snuff movie. Writer-director Oxide Pang, abetted by producer-brother, Danny, forces viewers to traverse an outlaw border of vicarious excitement. His screenplay dismantles the safety zone between horror fans and their central identification figure, calling forth disturbing but necessary questions about the psychic cost of artistic license.