J*A*S*M

Olympic level in the discipline of "inducing a feeling of deep inner turmoil". I haven't seen something so often beautiful, yet repulsive and disturbing in a long time. And my apologies to A24 for wrongly suspecting it of producing a straightforward war blockbuster. It's, of course, another auteur film, just the way we like it.

What starts as a very slow genre film demanding a patient viewer, with a very likeable sinister atmosphere, turns into a sequence of authentically scary scenes just before the halfway point. I enjoyed it. But then one plotline climaxes and the story takes a bit of a turn, and you suddenly realise that you are watching something more ambitious and sweeping than you had initially thought. And at that moment you regrets watching it with not very good English subtitles, because you get a bit lost in it :D So my advice at the moment is to wait for better language support, I'll definitely watch it again then to catch some details. Still, I suspect there hasn't been a better Asian horror film of this calibre since The Wailing.

I feel like a bit of an oddball for rating an obviously authentically loved by all bizarre film as low as I do, but I just don't see it there. And I've given it a chance twice! First time a couple of weeks ago, I gave up after 15 minutes, thinking it must have hit me in a bad mood. Today, the second time, I made it to the end, but no. I didn't laugh once, and I'm not even sure what I was supposed to laugh at. When you get the Teletubbies stoned and dress them in black and white, you get stoned black and white Teletubbies. They're still Teletubbies, not an independent film masterpiece.