206: A short film written, shot and directed by Malcolm Lam in 2001, under Wabi Sabi Films. It was shot in NYC in under $500, and is 22 minutes long. Ridiculously well done.

Visualize this:

A Japanese girl (Malcolm Lam's girlfriend, apparently.) is wrapping up the dead body of who we assume is her boyfriend in a plastic bag, and dragging him with comedic difficulty down the hallway in her apartment. All with a perfectly straight face, she plops him in her bathtub, and we hear her chopping him up into little pieces. After doing so, we see her very calmly putting wrapped up little pieces of her boyfriend into the fridge. Like a total pro, she then proceeds to go buy some cleaning supplies, get rid of any and all bloodstains using lysol, repainting the walls, etc.

Needing to unwind after such a long day of covering her ass, she takes a shower. (Bear in mind, the corpse of her boyfriend was hacked to bits in that bathroom just hours beforehand.) Wonderfully pleased with herself, she goes to bed and has a happy dream in which she walks down the street in a bright picnic blanket-y dress and pigtails. Upbeat music is playing, the Sun is shining, and she is smiling while eating a human hand.

When our heroine wakes up in the morning, we see her putting a few of the wrapped up chunks of her boyfriend into her backpack. She obviously doesn't take all of them at once because that would be far too heavy. She goes down to the subway, and puts in her farecard. What is most striking here is how normal she looks, and that any passerby would have no idea what she is carrying. Anyways, the girl gets off at a ton of different stops and hides her small black trashbags of boyfriend bits in different trashcans all over the city, back-alley dumps, the like.

In the meantime, we see a creep who lives in her apartment building go up into her apartment and sniffing her panties. When he is done, he goes to her kitchen to grab himself a beer. Upon opening the refrigerator he discovers the black plastic trashbags, and just as he is about to open them the girl arrives back at her apartment. She is forced to kill him and exasperatedly bashes his head in with an iron skillet. At this point the apartment manager/superintendent hears the noise and comes upstairs to investigate. I'll give you three guesses as to what happens to him.

The film ends with her standing in the train station reading a book. Some guy comes up and hits on her meekly. She looks up from her book disgruntled at being interrupted and replies calmly "Did you know there are 206 bones in the human body?" (This is the first and only time we hear her speak.) The guy looks uncomfortable and walks away. She smiles quietly/sinisterly.

Malcolm Lam just had another film come out last year which I have yet to see, called Falling In Rhythm. Also, if you do not know what "wabi-sabi" means, I would say the concept is worth looking into. If you're interested in more of his work, you can check out www.wabisabifilms.com. If nothing else, the site also has the extremely eerie and appropriate soundtrack to this movie, composed by Steve Santoro.

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