'Abigail Harm' is harmless but not particularly involving

A woman with a thin and somewhat annoying voice is reading a children's tale, "Through the Looking Glass" to a middle-aged white man. The woman is Abigail Harm and she's not the kind of person you'd normally build a movie around. "Abigail Harm" will screen on Saturday, 4 May 2013 at 7:15 in West Hollywood.

"Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the fawn's neck," she says. The man closes his eyes. The woman is Abigail Harm and she travels to people's homes "reading them stories from books they once loved" because these people cannot read any more. This is not the most uplifting job, not with such as quiet, passive non-descript woman as Abigail (Amanda Plummer). Then sometimes the job gets creepy. Her new client doesn't like her voice and wants her to read sexual descriptions from an instructional article about "undressing the girl next door."

Her clients asks, "Can you see the pictures, can you describe them?"

The narrator (Will Patton) tells us that sometimes the people say they see faces, but she doesn't believe them. We're also told that her father is dying, but she can't visit him because she doesn't know what she would say. Instead, she imagines that he's well again. She imagines that she's listening to him tell her a story about a woodcutter who save the life of a deer. The deer tells the woodcutter where to find a person and to hide its robe because "as long as you keep its robe, it will never leave you."

Abigail falls down the rabbit hole and into a world where she too finds a companion (Tetsuo Kuramochi) and finds comfort and love with him.

Director Lee Isaac Chung grounds us in reality, with common people, but I didn't feel the kind of magical chemistry between Kuramochi. Chung who co-wrote this piece with Samuel Gray Anderson brings the Korean folk tale, "The Woodcutter and the Nymph," into New York, but neither the relationship between father and daughter nor Abigail and the companion are intriguing enough to carry this movie.  Still, I do like the idea of using actors who look like ordinary people and the concept of bringing Asian folk tales into our reality much as TV programs such as "Once Upon a Time" are doing for European fairy tales.

"Abigail Harm" is a narrative feature of the Visual Communications L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival and screens on 4 May 2013 (Saturday), 7:15 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America (#2), 7920 Sunset Blvd. (At Hayworth, one block west of Fairfax) in West Hollywood. For more info, visit the festival's official website.