Monday: I feel so depressed I could sing the
blues.
Tuesday: Life sucks. Totally.
Wednesday: Nobody loves me.
Thursday: Why am I so alone?
Friday: All my luck is bad and it’s getting
worse
Saturday: It’s Saturday night and I got nowhere
to go but down
Sunday: Why is there blood on the floor and
blood on my hands?
This may sound like the diary of George W. Bush
during January 2007, but it is also the downbeat theme in the latest offering
from the always working Pang Brothers in this relentlessly glum film about
sanity or the lack of it in the heart of Hong Kong. Eschewing their typically
hyperventilating visuals and frantic camera movement, this film nearly all
takes place in a small suffocating apartment where the camera often simply
observes. It is more than a bit slow moving with very little seemingly happening
for much of the running time, but there are many hints that this is only on
the surface level and that beneath this is a horror waiting to reveal itself.
What keeps the viewer involved and intrigued is in discovering just what
the horror is.
Winnie is portrayed by the usually cherubic Charlene
Choi as if her credit cards were taken away by her management company, Emperor.
Engulfed by depression, she mechanically goes through her daily ritual or
stays morosely inert in the confines of her darkened apartment. To be sure
that the audience understands how mentally unwell she is a black cloud literally
comes through the window. The cause of this mood is that apparently her boyfriend
Seth left her without saying a word and she can’t contact him. She tells her
only friend Yee (Isabella) that every man eventually leaves her – they all
change after sex. One day she thinks she sees Seth and approaches him only
to discover that it is someone else, Ray (Shawn). She tells him that he reminds
her of her boyfriend and asks if it is o.k. if she talks with him. He says
yes.
Soon she is having him over for dinner and for
the night and he soon moves in, but her usual men problems surface when he
begins to lose interest in her, loses his job, just hangs out about the apartment
watching TV and is generally silent and detached. Like guys generally are.
He doesn’t seem to notice a few danger signs that are difficult to miss –
feverish chopping of meat in the kitchen with a large cleaver, changing her
story about her ex-boyfriend so that he now seems to have died, an obsession
with carving wooden puppets and an annoying habit of always asking him if
she is cuter than someone called Gillian while having sex. But how much of
what we are seeing is real and how much of it is in her clearly not stable
mind? The film slowly unpeels that onion and that is what keeps the viewer
going as it gets down to the final layer of madness.
This is barely a ripple in the Pang Brother’s filmography – fairly slight and not all that compelling but still worth taking a look at in particular for Charlene’s nearly one woman show. Though it will always be difficult for her to shake off her Twin’s idol image, she gives it a good go here with as dour a performance as one could get. It isn’t Meryl Streep territory or anywhere close, but she keeps it straight, never pouts and never even hints at her usually cuddly roles. In one scene she flicks her eyeballs around like a pinball machine and it is quite creepy and effective. Oh, by the way – Gillian is still much cuter.