Cannibal Mukbang
Mark is far from ugly, far from unattractive even though he thinks he is overweight, but he is shy, hesitant around women, conscious of the metal plate in his head stemming from the childhood car accident which claimed the lives of his parents, brought up in the foster system along with his older brother Maverick whose attitudes towards women did not shape his own, hesitant, doubting and self-sabotaging.
Fortunately, Ash is his absolute opposite, stunning, confident, direct, spontaneous, an internet personality who dresses for the camera even as she conceals her face, making mukbang videos, enjoying the indulgence of artfully created meals for the vicarious sensuous pleasure of her viewers, her chance encounter with Mark in a convenience store leading to a back-alley collision and the start of a collaboration blurring boundaries professional, personal and moral.
Written, produced, directed and edited by Aimee Kuge, her feature debut, Cannibal Mukbang takes its name from the Korean originating food phenomenon where hosts consume sometimes vast quantities in order to satisfy the needs of their followers, a modern artform to offer comfort to those who lack social interaction at meals mixed with mastication fantasies of beautiful women indulging their hungers for the vicarious pleasure of voyeuristic men.
April Consalo’s Ash forward, it is perhaps just as well as Nate Wise’s Mark tends towards backward, Clay von Carlowitz’s Maverick dismissing her as a manic pixie girl without even meeting her, he a swaggering success but a poor role model for Mark whose outlook is very different, a nice guy who becomes enraptured by the alluring woman who for reasons unknown seems to like him but whose temper blows hot and cold, sometimes sensual, sometimes brittle.
A mood she brushes off as hanger, Mark cannot help but be consumed by Ash, bound to her by flesh and blood, hooked on her cooking and complicit in her nocturnal activities, her carefully constructed online persona only a fraction of who she really is in real life, equally focused and dedicated but considerably darker and more dangerous than her rainbow glitter eyeshadow would imply, her kind but often controlling words at variance with her actions.
Asking the impossible in the sweetest way to ensure complicity, Cannibal Mukbang is deliberately more difficult to digest than the strange comfort it emulates, uneven in places and sometimes awkwardly staged due to the low budget but carried by the superb performances of Consalo and Wise, mesmerising as they become lost in each other and the monster they have created, the romantic comedy as body horror, 500 Days of Slaughter or Bonnie and Clyde with brisket.
Cannibal Mukbang will be available on digital download from Monday 9th June
