Spider Forest: A Deadly Case of Amnesia

Memory can be tricky but at least most people have the luxury of knowing their lives will unfold in a linear fashion. Not so, Kang Min (Kam Woo-seong). This unlucky victim of a hit-and-run accident is caught in an infernal time loop that has him regaining consciousness in the most traumatic parts of his past. Struggling to get a grip on reality, he's forced to relive the death of his wife (Suh Jung), the loss of his job as a TV producer, a deeply felt betrayal by his newscaster-girlfriend (Kang Kyeong-heon), and his all-but-forgotten childhood which he's slowly piecing together with some help from a strangely familiar photoshop owner (Suh Jung again). That Kang's doing all this while suffering from a spider-bite and a serious head injury only compounds his hallucinogenic disorientation. Beautifully shot and intoxicatingly cryptic, Song Il-gon's Spider Forest is a humdinger of a puzzler to be sure. You may be able to predict certain plot twists but Song executes them so exquisitely and with such nuance that even the expected feels fresh. A noir fable with a couple of steamy sexy scenes, Spider Forest is a movie I've got lost in more than once. No doubt, I'll go there again.

Green Chair: She Sure Likes 'em Young

She's a sexy older woman straight out of prison where she served time for seducing a minor. He's the not-so-traumatized boy on the cusp of manhood who comes to pick her up on the day she's released. High tension? Not a whit. Rather there's a subsequent half hour of soft porn in Green Chair during which the estranged lovers copulate in every position to see if they can exhaust their sexual attraction to each other. No such luck. Afterwards, we're force-fed the fantasized realities of a winter-summer romance which blossoms in the secluded home of the ex-con's best friend, a bohemian artist who makes bad coffee cups for a living. What you'll learn? Pedophilia is so taboo that no one really wants to confront it. Or maybe Age of Consent laws are so controversial, it's best to sidestep the issue. How much easier it is to make a sexy bit of erotica in which a divorcee (Suh Jung) worries about rejection, and a hormonal teenager (Shim Ji-ho) gets trained in the sack where the ultimate expression of love is swallowing. Writer-director Park Cheol-su needs to bone up on his Foucault, his Nabokov, and his Susie Bright.

The Isle: Shut Up and Mystify Us Already

Why do mute characters often register as innocent? Samantha Morton in The Sweet Low Down, Joe Morton in Brother From Another Planet, etc. all feel incapable of base emotions simply because they're unable to cuss out loud. Which is what makes the female lead (Suh Jung) of Kim Ki-duk's The Isle so disquieting. She may feel childlike in her silences but she's also as amoral as they come, a verifiable serial killer who'll murder caged birds, fellow prostitutes, or punky pimps just to make a simple point: Listen to me, goddamnit! (Metaphorically speaking, that is.) That humpy policeman on the run doesn't have a chance at escaping her motel of boxy houseboats once she's stuck a handful of fishhooks in that place where his worm has been. But to Kim's credit, The Isle isn't a romance of societal rejects any more than it's a character study about a kooky mass murderer. For me, The Isle was a surrealist's battle of the sexes, an anti-sentimentalist's icky look at love, a swamp-dweller's facts of life. When the tiny yellow houseboat drifts out to sea near the end of the movie, its not just a renegade vehicle, it's a lost soul. Chalk this one up as a film whose weirdness is inextricably bound to its greatness.