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Acacia, the third motion picture directed by Pak Ki-hyung (Whispering Corridors, Secret Tears) and starring Sim Hye-jin, the big star of the early 90s, was the closing film for the 2003 Pusan Film Festival.

A childless couple Mi-suk, a textile artist (Shim Hye-jin), and Do-il, a successful obstetrician, adopt an orphan, Jin-seong. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a creep (Of course. This is a horror film, right?), obsessed with an idea that his birth mother was reincarnated into a tree. He quickly grows attached to the dying acacia tree in his new house. When the boy goes missing after a particularly stressful night, the couple's married life begins to unravel.

Acacia is a perfect horror film for those who dislike the horror genre, bemoan the sensationalism of garden-variety horror films and are on the lookout for a "meaningful" example that "transcends the limitations" of the genre. For fans of the genre, conversely, it is a major disappointment, a clunky, lugubrious effort that telegraphs its "shocking" contents in big, block letters.

The central conceit of the "tree ghost" could have made for an interesting monster (not a very original idea, but how many original monsters can there be anyway?), but the way director Pak approaches it is rather unimaginative. Every single thing the "tree ghost" does in this film is completely predictable. The ambulatory tree that appears for all of five minutes or so in Poltergeist is much scarier than this film's acacia. And then there are embarrassing or confounding moments, such as the "death by ant attack" sequence featuring what appear to be one dozen ants (Was the old man suffering from a severe case of myrmecophobia?), weird arrangements of classical chestnuts for the background music (Wasn't that Rachmaninoff's Vocalise sung by a boy used in the climactic scene?) and spreading the key murder scenes over the end credits (To prevent the viewers from leaving the theater in a huff?). As for the "plot twists" in the climax, the tone is too dark, the household too antiseptic, the husband and wife too twitchy in the early part of the movie for the viewers to be surprised by them.

While not a total loss, (there are sporadic sequences that are effective, such as Do-il's nightmares about delivery of his child, or Jin-seong's friendship with a vaguely ESP-gifted girl next door) Acacia is uncomfortably caught between generic expectations and the director's ambition to inject (moralistic) commentaries about the state of (bourgeois) family life in contemporary Korea, chasing after two rabbits and losing both.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

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