A boy has lost his way. Rather than feeling sympathy for him, we fear him. We fear that he might snoop around our house or secretly come inside. The boy is suppressed and driven away from our consciousness. But eventually he returns home. Acacia is a beautiful and yet scary film about a closed family system. In a beautiful country house, Mi-sook lives a happy and secure life with her husband and in-laws. Her only concern is that they have no children after 10 years of marriage. Mi-sook and her husband decide to go to an orphanage where they adopt a boy who seems mature for his age (he was creating a painting resembling Munch′s ′Scream′.) But when Jin-sung, the boy, begins to show unusual affection for the Acacia tree and to play with dead insects, the couple becomes alarmed and a gloomy foreboding falls upon the peaceful household. This is Park Ki-hyung′s third film since his directorial debut Whispering Corridors, through which he had revived the traditional horror film genre in Korean cinema. Acacia, unlike other horror films with ghost apparitions, is a unique piece of work in which an intangible ominous feeling - much like a creeping insect inside one′s clothes - is present. The director displays excellent skills in creating an unknown anxiety without depending on the effects of night and day or shocking sounds and editing skills. The anxiety can be felt from the development of the characters; the ghastly-looking boy who appears to hide a certain evilness, the disquietingly perky girl next door, the grandfather who stares at the family with ambiguity, and the eerie-looking Acacia tree. This film may have multiple meanings related to social issues as it can be viewed as the tragic story of a boy who has been deprived of a refuge, or as a social drama depicting the troubled reality of a middle class family.