Three… Extremes

I just watched Three… Extremes and it’s a mix of brilliance and discomfort. It brings together three famous Asian directors, Fruit Chan from Hong Kong, Park Chan-wook from South Korea, and Takashi Miike from Japan, each telling a short horror story in their own way. There’s no connection between the stories, but all explore fear, guilt, and human cruelty.

The first story, Dumplings directed by Fruit Chan, was both fascinating and disturbing. It follows Mrs. Li, an aging actress desperate to regain her youth, who visits Aunt Mei for special dumplings said to make people look younger. What she discovers about the ingredients turns the story from dark humor into pure horror. The theme of vanity and the price of beauty is handled with style, and Christopher Doyle’s colorful camera work makes everything look rich and unsettling. Bai Ling is incredible as Aunt Mei, calm, strange, and terrifying. Even though I’d seen the full-length version, this short still felt sharp and complete.

The second story, Cut by Park Chan-wook, is brutal and psychological. A film director and his wife are kidnapped by a bitter extra who feels life has treated him unfairly. He forces the director into a deadly moral test where every wrong move costs his wife a finger. The set design is striking, clean, colorful, and cruelly bright, and the tension builds fast. Park uses violence and irony to question what makes someone good. The acting is intense and the mix of horror and dark humor gives it real power.

The last story, Box, directed by Takashi Miike, is slow, quiet, and dreamlike. It follows a writer haunted by her past where jealousy and guilt led to a terrible event involving her twin sister. The snowy setting is beautiful but the story moves very slowly and the emotions feel distant. It has haunting imagery and a shocking ending, yet it never reaches the same tension as the other two. It feels more like a sad poem than a horror story.

Together, these three stories show different sides of fear: the fear of aging, the fear of moral failure, and the fear of your own past. Three… Extremes is stylish, twisted, and often hard to watch, but it never feels cheap or pointless. For me, Dumplings and Cut are strong and unforgettable while Box is beautiful but cold. Still, the film as a whole proves how horror can explore human weakness in strange, powerful ways.