The Doll Master

suicide_girl · Fri Jun 15, 2007 5:43 am 3 Extreme : Cut

Three... Extremes: Cut

Director:
Park Chan-wook

Plot Summary:
A successful film director and his wife are kidnapped by an extra, where the director is forced to play his sadistic games. If he fails, his wife's fingers will be chopped off one by one every five minutes.

Cast (Credited cast):
Byung-hun Lee ... Director
Won-hie Lim ... Stranger (as Won-Hee Lim)
Hye-jeong Kang ... Director's Wife
Dae-yeon Lee ... Actor in School Girl
Gene Woo Park ... Assistant
Mi Mi Lee ... Kyung-Ah
Gyu-sik Kim ... Old Man Mannequin
Jung-ah Yum ... Vampire Actress

All Title(s):
Three, Monster (South Korea)
Three... Extremes (International)
Saam Gaang yi (Original)

Jisatsu~Saakura. · Tue Sep 11, 2007 7:35 pm

w00t one of my first horrors.
But not quite that scary. It was clever, and deep.

ijonchrist · Thu Sep 13, 2007 1:08 pm My review and ending theory...

I wouldn't consider this to be one of the greats, but it's still pretty damn great for a short horror movie. The horror in this film is much more psychological than a lot of others I've seen, particularly when you try to look at it from the perspectives of the three 'innocent' characters in the house individually. The antagonist is one nasty son of a bitch, that's for sure!

Before I go on about details, I'd like to say that I recommend this film to anyone browsing the site. You wouldn't be here if you weren't interested in horror films anyway, right?

***SPOILERS***

The idea of someone invading your home and harming your loved ones is terrifying to most of us... especially if we are to be forced to watch someone we love be tortured or otherwise harmed. That's the real horror of this film to me... there are no jump-scares or creepy looking ghosts hiding around the corner here.

This movie deals with what is sadly a much more real horror... the sickness of the human mind. I realized that this is what really got me about this movie: this could actually happen. In fact, a lot of terrible things that aren't too different from the ideas in this film happen to a lot of people everyday, though obviously not in the same context. That's truly frightening!

The ending of the film was very interesting, and seems to have effected a lot of viewers in a lot of different ways. I liked the way the events in the beginning of the film (at the movie set) came to take place at the end of the film in the director's own home. Some people on other message boards saw the ultimate finale as a cop out (they say Chan-wook Park didn't know how to end the film or just wanted to twist it), though I don't think that was the case. Here are a few of the more thought out explanations that people have presented:

1. The Director snapped from the trauma of the night's events and killed his wife while delusional... thinking she was his girlfriend.

2. The woman actually was his girlfriend, and the Extra had mistaken her for his wife. The Director killed her so his wife wouldn't find out about her.

3. The child had mental powers equivalent to mind control, hence his father couldn't kill him and tried to get the Director to do so for him.

4. The Director realized he had to kill the boy in the end, as he'd just seen his own father killed and swore revenge. Because he couldn't bring himself to kill a child, the Director 'imagined' the boy as his wife... who he did actually feel animosity towards.

Personally, I side with theory 4. I'll get to the why after I give my reasons for discounting the first three. Here goes:

1. This is feasible, but I don't see any reason why the Director would have snapped at that point. I'm no psychologist, but I think he would have just killed the child before if he had been pushed that far. Also, why would he think she was his girlfriend anyway? Too thin for me...

2. No way... not after all the stalking the Extra had done up to that night. After all his work, would he really mistake the mistress for the Director's wife? No, I think he knew too much about his prey to make such a critical mistake. There were too many other details involved, including her profession (pianist v. actress) and her status as wife v. mistress. The Extra was psychotic, but not an idiot.

3. This is the most possible of these first three, but I just don't buy it either. First, the idea of psychic-like abilities has no pertinence in the rest of the film. I don't think Park is so sloppy as to just introduce this concept suddenly with no explanation or back-story.

4. This is the one, as far as I'm concerned. Remember that the rubber rope, or bungee (for lack of a better word), was not long enough for the Director to reach his wife, while it was just right for him to get to the child. Also, the words that the Director speaks during the strangling seem to hint at this theory as well for me. He speaks of his wife in the third person, while directly addressing his victim. I must assume that he pictured his wife because A)he couldn't bring himself to strangle an innocent child (no matter how f***ed up the kid must have been by that point), and B)because he already held a lot of hatred towards his wife and that enabled him to go through with such a drastic act as strangling someone.

Those are my thoughts for now. I really enjoyed the movie, and the ending was one that I thought about and dissected for a while afterwards. All in all this film is well worth the 40 minutes or so of your time it will take to watch it!