Acacia is a South Korean horror film about a Doctor and his wife seeking to adopt a child together. The wife is attracted to a little orphan boy's artistic talent (for drawing creepy looking pictures of trees), thinking he's got a high I.Q. When they get the boy home, strange things start happening. He has a strange
fascination with insects and the acacia tree in their back yard. Soon, the mother gets pregnant and the couple have their own "real" child, and the adopted son gets jealous. It even seems as though he'll hurt the baby, and the couple start to discuss the real possibility of sending him back to the orphanage. He overhears this conversation though, and before running off into the night, he declares his mom is a "tree". Meanwhile, the dad, who is an ob/gyn, delivers a dead baby then rushes home. It was around the halfway mark I realized this movie wasn't very coherent, scary or even interesting. After the boy runs away, the tree grows leaves, and then there's a pointless rape scene. It's obvious the filmmakers were trying to take an artistic approach to making a horror movie, but in the end it is just about a "killer tree", and how scary can you possibly make such a thing?
March 14, 2009
