Three... Extremes

Director: Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, Fruit Chan

2004 / 125min / 35mm

The Lee-penned “Dumplings”—the tale of a former TV star (Miriam Yeung) who discovers the anti-aging properties of snacking on aborted fetuses prepared by Bai Ling, doubling as allegorical commentary on growing gender imbalances in China and later expanded into a feature by director Chan—leads off this Hong Kong/South Korea/Japan co-produced horror anthology, followed by the ingeniously torturous crucible of Park’s “Cut” and Miike’s tricky and profoundly unsettling “Box.” “Deeply, profoundly creepy… What all three of these stories share is the quality found in Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King: an attention to horror as it emerges from everyday life as transformed by fear, fantasy, and depravity.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times