Mysterious, literate and intense, yet enlivened throughout by that blackerthan- black humour so characteristic of its national cinema, Members of the Funeral is a very South Korean take on the family melodrama. Elements of the suspense thriller also feature, and are pointed up by recurrent references to Agatha Christie: as in one of her country house mysteries, we begin with a dead body and several interested parties, whose level of implication in the death must be determined… A teenaged schoolboy has taken his own life, and a middle-aged couple and their teen daughter are surprised to meet one another at his funeral. Each had an intense connection to the deceased, but was unaware of his involvement with the others. Their spiky, aggressive interaction around the rather meagre funeral banquet is interspersed with flashbacks that reveal what led up to this point – and how the deceased, Roh Hee-jun (Lee Ju-seung), fits into the picture. Mother Oh Jung-hee (Park Myung-shin) was the dead boy’s literature professor, and took out on him her enduring bitterness at the failure of her own writing ambitions. What she didn’t notice was that Hee-jun’s arch little stories recorded – in detail – his friendship with her daughter Woo Ami (Kim Byul), and his even closer bond with her repressed homosexual husband, Woo Jun-gi (Yoo Ha-bok)… Further and ever-stranger flashbacks reveal how Hee-jun and Ami revelled in a shared fascination with death, and how Woo Jun-gi processed a painful childhood via sexually charged father/son role-play with his favourite students. As troubling as some of this detail is, it’s largely played for shady, camp laughs. The result is a sort of Gothic suspense thriller twisted into the form of a soap opera – or is it vice versa? And then there’s a further deconstructionist twist, which wakens the ghost of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation: are we watching things that really happened, or are the flashbacks Hee-jun’s fictions, the same ones criticised so severely by Jung-hee? An angry, daring little puzzle, this film never stops being grimly funny, but also has intelligent comment to pass upon the sublimation of rage and sexual trauma, the dire ways in which stifled creative energy can manifest itself, and the endless layers of deception within families.