Moebius

[Moebius] would be easy to dismiss if Kim weren't so sincere and sober in pursuit of his Oedipal and other emotional concerns.

It's one from the heart, and a twisted tale it is.

Such is Kim's plotty momentum that the whole thing feels like an extreme joke made of pained silences, one that somehow strips bare the subtext of overbearing parents.

When it comes down to it, this a movie where the only major female characters are intentionally interchangeable and exist only to castrate men.

Moebius is almost weird enough to be a creation myth, and that's no small accomplishment.

As an exercise in unrelenting discomfort, it's hard to beat this monstrous experiment from Korean provocateur Kim Ki-duk.

An outrageous Oedipal psychodrama that rubs and chafes against Buddhist parable, it also chooses, without a single line of dialogue, to show rather than tell its jaw-droppingly transgressive acts with Chaplin-esque distance.

The clever twists in the story are captivating enough to compensate for the disgusting nature of the acts on-screen.

[Kim Ki-duk] peppers his film's nastiness with baroque humour.

A formalist slice of perversity that never coheres into anything more meaningful than a willful piece of cinematic provocation.

Even by Kim's extreme standards, Moebius maintains such a pitbull hold on its straight-world targets that it enters a shadowy realm of post-subversion.

Moebius marks another feature to come from an innovative director who manages to live up to expectation, and yet at the same time, he never fails to compel and surprise.