Dir. Ki-duk Kim
Starring: Jae-hyeon Jo, Eun-woo Lee, Young-ju Seo
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Moebius is my idea of a perfect date movie because, frankly, any date who storms out of it in disgust is, quite simply, not someone you want to spend any time with anyway. Good riddance, I say! You don't like Ki-duk Kim? Find some loser who'll suffer through dinner at The Keg followed by a screening of The Fault in Our Stars.
Life's too short! Hasta la vista, baby! Granted, you might have to see Moebius by yourself, but that's just fine. Why see it with anyone unless you can see it with someone you truly love?
Love, by the way, is what this picture is all about. Love between a husband and wife, a husband and his mistress, a husband and his son and, well, in addition to a few other love couplings, each getting more perversely intense than the last, Moebius is ultimately focused upon the greatest love of all, love for a penis. Not just any penis, mind you. When a disgruntled wifey attempts to slice the penis off her philandering hubby, she's thwarted in her efforts by not quite being, uh, on the ball enough to do it properly. In frustration, she does the next best thing, she slices off the penis belonging to her teenage son. An aghast hubby thinks the penis might be salvageable, but wifey does what any Mother would do, she stuffs it in her mouth and eats it.
A teenage lad without a penis is a pitiful thing. He sprays urine all over his shoes in public washrooms, is teased by classmates and he can't even indulge in a gang rape properly. Dad teaches the lad how to make use of extreme self-inflicted pain as an erogenous zone and eventually does what any good father would do. Dad sacrifices his own penis so his Son can be a man again.
Alas, the penis truly belongs to Dad and can only give pleasure to those who received pleasure from it and can only receive pleasure from those who once pleasured it. Uh, Mom? We think you're needed in Sonny's boudoir.
To say Moebius might not be appreciated by everyone is probably an understatement, but it's a dazzlingly sickening and funny exploration of family, fidelity, love and, ultimately, the notion of anatomy taking on personal properties rooted (so to speak) in the spirit from whence it came.
The only guarantee I can ultimately offer, however, is that you'll have not quite seen anything like Moebius. The film is pitched to levels of extremity seldom matched and director Ki-duk Kim tells his perverse tale with no dialogue and plenty of over-the-top pantomime. This is nothing to discount. It's pure cinema!
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half-Stars
Moebius is in limited release via VSC and is on display at Toronto's majestic Royal Cinema.