Acacia (2003)

Overrated and overhyped

An absolute waste of money

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

It seems to me like in the wake of tarnished US versions of cool Eastern horror the entire genre has been tainted. The original versions of The Grudge, Ring and Dark Water are classics, but these newer eastern horrors are not up to scratch at all...see this one, and Double Vision, for instance...Hey - if I went to an orphanage to pick a child, I'd pick the weirdest one too! Wouldn't anyone? Well, no...but the reason I would write down for getting an orphan would be more along the lines of 'must be able to go to off license' or 'must be silent at all times'. I'm sure if I went to the orphanage it could well be plausible that I would emerge with a kid, who even though he is good at drawing, thinks his dead mum has been reincarnated as a tree. Not even that - he thinks his mum is the acacia tree in his new family's back garden! And here starts the yawn fest that is Acacia. After half an hour I wasn't sure whether the film was supposed to be horror or not. Seriously. I was rather confused. It just seemed that there was this very moody kid, his neurotic new mother and crazed dad, and equally weird and annoying grandparents. The kid is too weird to like, but the family try anyway, even though all his affection goes to the acacia in the back garden. Surprise - a family grown babe arrives! Cue jealousy and weirdness, then the strange kid goes missing and the acacia tree starts killing people through it's leaves and protective ant army. Cue me starting to fall asleep, only to wake up to find the husband raping his wife for some reason (explained in the film, but I'll leave it out)... At one point the kid manages to:Set fire to a shed while being inside it and emerge unburned. His new mother doesn't even bother asking whyAnd also:The kid manages to break a glass patio door with a beetle. Explain that.Well, if you want to see something boring - feel free. I'd avoid to be honest.

"Akasia" is a fairly underrated mixture of a family drama and psycho thriller from South Korea. It is a really slow paced movie but the actors all deliver an amazing job and are always authentic so that the long introduction to a more and more terrifying downward spiral of terror with a great twisted ending was worth all the wait. One must underline the great performances of the two very young actors, especially Mun Oh-bin. Another strength of the movie is the atmospheric score and the artistic factor of the movie, for example the way the camera captures the different states and forms of the mysterious Acacia tree or the different drawings the young boy makes that mostly honour the Norwegian painter Edvard Much and its masterpiece "Skrik".This is a movie comparable to a film by David Lynch where everything starts very slowly but at a certain point, most people are losing it and it's very difficult to follow the movie in the end. Every detail is important in this movie even if some scenes might seem weird or useless at first sight. The difference in here between Daviud Lynch and Park Ki-hyeong is that the ending of the movie offers us a disturbing conclusion that explains everything that really happened once again in a very detailed way.This movie is surely nothing for the masses and addresses to a public that is at ease with exotic and slow paced psycho thrillers that ask to use the brain and not only relax and watch. The movie convinces me because of its numerous details and artistic roots. Anyone that is into weird Asian horror movies should give this a try and might adore the movie.

No serious spoilers, but some very minor ones."Acacia", a Korean contribution to the ever popular Asian horror wave, concerns a husband and wife who decide that they're getting on a bit and decide to adopt a child. The child, who has an usual obsession with the dead tree in the family's garden, eventually disappears when the couple eventually have a child of their own and the aforementioned tree seems to hold a grudge against the family itself.And that's about it. The film moves at a snails pace, clocking in at over 100 minutes with 80 minute material. It is essentially a thin family drama with a creepy tree, and there is very little in the way of scares, just shots of the tree with weird mumbling noises playing over the top. However, the idea of the tree being the child's mother is a pretty original one, but it isn't exactly exploited to its full potential. This sort of separates "Acacia" from much of the new wave it belongs to: films like Ju-On and Ring tend to do the opposite, and milk bland ideas until they are red in the face.The film does begin to get going towards the end; however the realisation of the child's fate and the parent's actions not only dampen the earlier curiosity of the story, but are revealed with such machine gun editing that it's difficult to take in all at once. The final sequence is undoubtedly creepy, however it feels like too little too late.Overall, the film does not feel too much like a Ring cash in, however with the "film renaissance" that Korea is currently going through, I couldn't help but feel this film could have been so much more.

I got an advanced copy of the recently released Region 1 disc from Tartan Video, and I was curious about this... I ended up really loving it. Acacia is one of those rare tree-based horror movies, where a tree takes control of something and terrible events happen... What was special about "Acacia" was that it was not only very creepy and eerie, but it also contained some very beautiful and haunting imagery. This movie is really, very close to being perfect. Rent it and watch it open-mindedly, and you will probably like it as much as I did. And if you wanna buy it, by all means do it, because it's completely worth the money.My rating: 9/10 (a minor flaw)