There are two reasons why this film is so troubling, one being the misogyny supported within the text. For those of you who could care less about Feminist critiques, you can skip the last two paragraphs since you won't be hearing me anyway, but I'll begin with the other trouble: The film fails its genre.Plastic Tree revolves around three characters: An effeminate and meek barber named Sue (Kim In-kwon); his girlfriend, Won-young (Cho Eun-sook), who works in a "man's job" delivering packages on her scooter; and an acquaintance from Sue's youth, Byung-ho (Kim Jung-hyun), a hyper-aggressive man prone to verbally mounting Sue to prove his alpha male status. Byong-ho is a "rat in the kitchen", a threat to Sue since he correctly suspects that Byong-ho might steal his girlfriend. Over halfway through we discover the film is supposed to be a psychological thriller. Such is announced by an aural cliche of dissonant, orchestral strings. Major plotlines from which the suspense is to be drawn are then presented through flashbacks, which are more funny than scary. What Eo intends to shock, actually mocks, ending up accidentally parodying himself. If a real effort had been made to deconstruct genre conventions, then we could allow these decisions on Eo's part. But the film purports to be a serious thriller and it fails to maintain suspense when he most wants to manipulate us. And what's most disappointing about Eo's poor use of non-diegetic sound and flashbacks is that his few successful scenes show us he doesn't even need them. The snip-snip-snipping of out-of-frame barber's shears is haunting enough without any symphonic assistance. And the most chilling scene is flashbackless, simply showing Sue squashing a bug while the radio DJ narration in the background illuminates what Sue is really squashing.

And it is this scene which codas and alludes to violence throughout the film that is a regressive reaction to shifts in gender dynamics in modern day South Korea. It is here where misogyny finds support, however unintentional. What else can we think when a rape is presented as just what the woman needed all within a filmic text that refuses solidarity across genders, demanding that rigid gender roles be adhered to or else risk psychological damage? Eo even adds to this phallic mis-love story by metaphoring cunnilingus as a symbol of masculine lack rather than one of the varied ways we have to pleasure each other. (It is interesting how the first scene of consensual cunnilingus is portrayed unconvincingly, similar to the fellatio scene in Yu Ha's Marriage is a Crazy Thing, whereas the second cunnilingus scene, arguably another rape scene, is portrayed with striking realism, even showing us some of that, *gasp*, "obscene" pubic hair.)