Jeong-won Shin, 2009
You can always count on the New York Asian Film Festival to bring the wacky, and tonight, with this film about a giant, man-eating wild boar, it did not disappoint.
In his review of the festival for the Rail, David Wilentz invokes Zizek's famous prescriptive for horror films: if you want to find out what one is about, take away the monster and see what you've got. Wilentz reckons that this make Chaw really about man's inhumanity to man, which proves far worse than anything the pig can do. To this I would only add that Shin quite cleverly leaves it up in the air whether this cruelty and bad behavior is pure animal instinct or a more recent development related to the rape of the environment that has caused the animal to turn to human prey.
NYAFF billed Chaw as a black comedy; so often that means less "really funny" and more "obvious and snide social comedy." But Chaw made me laugh my ass off; its portraits of human frailty and cowardice prove genuinely funny. Most horror films let you feel comfortably superior to its scared characters, Shin keeps you aware that, given the circumstances, you'd probably behave in the same way. Shin also successfully deploys different kinds of humor, from satire to gross-out. Even more than poop jokes, there's lots of piss jokes. Shin very cleverly rotates the horror genre formula of (s)he who has sex dies to he who pisses in public gets attacked. (Does this maybe exist in other horror films?)
The film is not as gory as I expected, and while it definitely errs more on the funny side than the scary, the film nevertheless delivers some thrills. The creature is a lot of fun and only obviously CGI in a few fleeting moments. Shin wisely aims for creating tension rather than strictly scaring you, and the chase scenes toward the end are good fun.
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