This is a very low-key, literary horror that had me fascinated all the way through. Told from three different perspectives, in three different sections, it follows a young woman who becomes vegetarian and who, ultimately, wants to turn into a tree. There's the odd surrealist moment that very slightly undermines the presentation of her behaviour as a mental illness - her eventual refusal to eat at all is diagnosed as anorexia, for example - but the whole thing is so destabilising, so unnerving, that the question of Yeong-hye's sanity is almost moot. Because really, this world that she's trying to escape? It seems pretty shit. On the surface, she's married, with a mildly interesting job in comics, and has a close if not entirely supportive family. They're living the middle-class dream in South Korea, except for the fact that everyone, absolutely everyone is an emotionally stunted wreck. Her husband works ludicrous hours, is completely obsessed with cultivating an appearance of utter normality, and is frankly a rapist. Her father is physically abusive to his children and to animals. Her sister is lovely, and loves her, but is holding the wider family together only by subsuming her own identity into being the perfect daughter, the perfect wife, and the weight of it all is just crushing her further towards her own breakdown. It's an unpleasant depiction of an extremely ordered patriarchal culture, and no surprise really that Yeong-hye wants out. 

It's her determination to out by becoming a tree that makes the whole thing so weird, and so damn terrifying.