Chan starts with "Dumplings," the tale of an aging ex-actress who visits a woman for dumplings that restore youth but are made with a gruesome ingredient.
In "Cut," by Park, a successful film director and his wife are kidnapped by an extra from his movies and tortured.
With "Box," Miike tells the story of a woman haunted by nightmares of being buried in a box in the snow.
Unlike so many mediocre anthologies, in which the individual episodes are usually one-note "just desserts" stories with endings telegraphed as soon as you know the setup, the stories in Three...Extremes are presented and treated as complete films in their own right, with more vivid characterization, unexpected plot developments, multiple locations, and complex camera setups.
The movie is expectedly violent and button-pushing. With directors with these track records, all three segments address and depict taboo subject matter including and not limited to child murder, incest, torture, mutilation, cannibalism, and abortion.
This is a challenging movie to watch, not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, but if you have an iron constitution, you'll be able see absolutely exemplary filmmaking, craftsmanship, and style. Each entry showcases its director's personality and sensibilities.
“Dumplings” wastes little time revealing what the secret ingredient in its eponymous dish is: aborted fetuses. That's not a spoiler because it's only a couple of minutes in, and Chan gives a lot of extreme closeups of the cooking process, especially the chopping. He also includes sickening sound effects of chewing; the close-up of a woman eating has never been so ominous or disturbing.
Ultimately, “Dumplings” shows the lengths people will go to feed their vanity, clinging to their youth and beauty no matter the cost. Chan's entry is claustrophobic as he deploys tight framing: tiny apartments, cramped spaces, and even a fancy dinner party is limited because we can only see through a narrow doorway.
In his entry, Park displays his black sense of humor, opening with a vampire feeding on a victim, talking to someone on the phone and asking if that person minds “frozen leftovers.” Then the film pulls back to reveal what we've been watching is a movie within a movie. It doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of the story, but it's pretty funny.
The meat of this entry is the hostage situation. Unlike Chan, Park uses wider frames and longer takes to showcase his ornate sets, so we get to see all the elements and characters simultaneously, and the result is surreal and blackly comical.
The extra forces the director to make a choice: murder a child or watch as his wife's fingers are chopped off. It's a sadistic conundrum, and the image of the wife, tied up like a marionette at a piano, is one of the film's most memorable.
For the final piece of the film, Miike ends the film on a quieter, somber, and sad meditation on guilt and regret.
Most if not all of this segment is without music, and there's little dialogue as the main character walks alone in a field of snow or against a blank wall, and Miike flashes back to show her childhood as a circus dancer with her twin sister Shoko, revealing how shame and jealousy led to a tragic accident. The accident, save for some dialogue, is completely quiet, no sound effects, until the flames ignite, and the rush of the fire is like a punch to the face.
I had to watch "Cut" twice to see if I could make more sense of it, but I'm still at a loss to explain everything. It's surreal, dreamlike, and you can't be sure if what you're watching is really happening, a memory, a dream, or something else. There are abstract images that don't seem to belong to the narrative but are vivid and memorable, especially the conjoined dancers.
While there are some shocking things in it and other horrible things implied, it feels less like a horror piece than the other two. It's a curious segment to end the movie on and might require more patience than fortitude.
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