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Directed by Takashi Miike of Japan, tackles mythical and dreamy theme of horror that haunts Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa), a successful and renowned beauty. The main character is trapped in a web of claustrophobic scenes, which chug along at a painfully slow pace, with Kyoko confined to a solitary and secrecy-laden life.

On the surface, Kyoko has ambivalent feelings toward her editor who has a crush on her. But she hesitates to open her heart to him because of a traumatic childhood experience. Deploying techniques that can be defined as a minimalist fantasy, the film shows what really happened. At the tender age of 10, Kyoko accidentally caused her twin sister Shoko - a rival for the affection of their surrogate father Hikita - to be burned to death. Stricken by grief, Hikita vanished shortly afterwards. Adding to the tangle, the editor looks exactly like Hikita. Meanwhile, Kyoko has been struggling to fend off the recurring dreams and memories of her twin sister.

The film does not stray from well-known motifs: jealousy, murder, guilt, and the judgment. Fantasy and reality intertwine, detach, and then overlap one another, making it hard to regard the suffocating images as real.

Dumplings

Directed by Fruit Chan of Hong Kong, mixes one long-running human desire to retain youthful beauty - with another insatiable desire - eating. Instead of a wicked deal with a devil, Qing (Miriam Yeung), an ex-starlet who is now the wife of a rich man, chooses to embark on a culinary journey to eat specialty dumplings, which are reputed to have some rejuvenating effect. A mysterious chef, Mei, a former gynecologist, caters to such wealthy yet desperate women willing to pay for a fortune to recover their beauty. Her secret recipe for the dumplings: human fetuses, obtained from abortions.

Grotesqueness ratchets up to a truly bewildering level when Qing slowly chews the dumplings, mincing and twisting her lips. The strange cracking sound will surely send shivers down the spines of the audience.

Cut

The opening piece by award-winning Korean director Park Chan-wook, is bizarre and unnerving. The story starts with a grotesque yet eerily funny filmmaking scene in which a female vampire feasts on a human being. It turns out that the scene is part of a movie being filmed by Ryu Ji-ho, an extremely successful film director who has earned wide and solid support from both the audience and critics. He is a sort of Mr. Perfect: wealthy, respected, talented, happily-married, good-looking, kindhearted. Really? Ryu's perfection is seriously challenged when he returns home and encounters a complete stranger - an extra who participated in some of Ryu's movies. Ryu had never paid attention to this obscure man - until now.

The intruder, who has nothing to lose, reveals deep-seated hatred toward the director, who has everything to lose. The intruder has brought along a small child and taken Ryu's pianist wife hostage. Ryu is given a mind-boggling choice: kill the innocent child or to watch his wife's fingers cut off one by one at five-minute intervals.