Acacia: When the Bough Breaks the Family Will Fall

High art horror? It can happen. Acacia is proof of nothing less. Park Ki-hyeong's slow-burn psychodrama about a middle-aged couple who adopt an autistic boy (Mun Oh-bin) is simultaneously an avant garde portrait of middle-class ennui with its prolonged silences of estrangement and its sinisterly surrealist touches and a typical Saturday afternoon chiller with spooky music, sudden camera lurches, and a building body count. Neither approach feels at cross purposes with the other since Park is committed to both in full. Sure, he'll have the psychotic mother (Shim Hye-jin) wield scissors against her husband (Kim Jin-geun) but he'll also have her do it in a living room that she's converted into an art installation of red yarn. Why shouldn't life be acted out amid a gallery's worth of symbols? By the final climax, during which two murders -- one present; one past -- are revealed, Acacia has so effectively grafted its two opposing genres together that you accept the tree in the backyard as a harmless plant that the crazies have laden with meaning and as an evil force incapable of mercy. No interpretation is wrong. Freezeframe the Munch-like drawings by the precocious orphan if you're looking for further explanation.

Whispering Corridors: The First of Four Parts

Room 3-3 is spooked. Just ask skittish homeroom teacher Mrs. Park or her replacement, the lascivious Mr. Oh. Except you can't ask them. They're dead! So take your question to another staff member and recent grad, the personable Hur Eun-young (Lee Mi-yeon). She, like you, is trying to figure out the cause behind these recent "suicides" and has much time on her hands to do so because she's without any classes to teach. (I guess this highly competitive all-girls school has a strict policy that first-year teachers should observe, not instruct.) What she'll tell you is that the letters JJ were carved into that desk at the back of the room by none other than herself. But as to the red water-stain on the ceiling, she, like you, must wait until the end of Whispering Corridors for an answer as to how it got there and why it keeps getting bigger! Not that she'll care. She'll be too preoccupied with convincing the spirit of her late best friend that childhood betrayals should be forgiven, not avenged. Park Ki-hyeong's ghost story inspired three sequels: Whispering Corridors II, Wishing Stairs, and Voice. Such is the allure of the paranormal when dressed in short skirts and knee socks.