The Pang Brothers are a bit hit and miss so that you never quite know what to expect from one of their films. They are Chinese-Thai and go back and forth between the two film industries. Overall though, I like most of their films that I have seen with only a few duds along the way. They started off great with the Thai film Bangkok Dangerous in 1999 that they then re-made for Hollywood in 2008, which was very different from the Thai version but I liked it as well. Bangkok Haunted which they contributed to was a good Thai horror film when horror was big in Thailand and then they had their big success with the HK-Thai film The Eye. It was a huge hit and led to two sequels in theme only. The Tesseract, Ab-Normal Beauty and The Detective are pretty good as well but I admit I have lost track of the Pang Brothers over the past decade but they are still around and about. I have had this DVD sitting on my shelf for about 12 years and so dragged it down to watch. I probably should have left it up there for another 12 years. Maybe like wine it would have gotten better.


For the most part their reputation was built on horror so one has to wonder what happened to this film. It lies there like a sleeping dog in the middle of the road and nothing can wake it up and it is just a matter of time till a truck runs over it. This is just a misshapen lump of a film in which it feels like they wrote the script as they went – which is not always a bad thing – Casablanca for example – but this in no Casablanca. In theory it is a horror film but without a scare or a thrill or a chill. I think Danny Pang (his fingerprints are all over this one as Oxide was smart enough not to have his name anywhere on the credits) gave his actors simple instructions – Ekin Cheng you look annoyed at everything, Rain Li you look like someone ate your dessert when you weren't looking and Shu Qi (aka Hsu Chi) you look professional, unsmiling but still stunning. Hard for her not to look the stunning part.


And all of you do a lot of running through the forest looking scared and express some dialogue that makes no sense. I am a big fan of Shu Qi going back to her first films in Hong Kong and through her discovery as a muse by art director Hou Hsiao-hsien and was looking forward to seeing her in this but it was a no go. She was not enough to save it for me and generally I could happily watch her read a newspaper for two hours. And sip coffee.


There is a forest out there – where isn’t exactly clear – and though shot in Thailand it seems to be 10 minutes outside of Hong Kong – where people go to kill themselves. This idea likely springs from the Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mt. Fuji that is legendary for suicides taking place there. In the film though one woman who died there is thought to have been murdered by a man named Wong and Shu Qi is the detective on the case. Wong claims the woman had killed herself when he discovered her and gave her mouth to mouth. An ambitious journalist (Rain Li) is doing a sensational piece on the forest, the suicides and whether there are supernatural forces at work. And Ekin is the irritated botanist boyfriend of Rain Li who thinks he has discovered a way for plants to respond to emotional stimuli (if only Ekin could in his acting). At one point Shu Qi comes to Ekin to get his help and he says can I request anything from you in return? She says yes and the very next shot is of him on top of a woman in bed and I think that was some request but understandable but it turns out to be Rain Li. Oh well. All four of them end up in the forest together to do a test to see how the trees react to Wong.


But none of it makes any sense, these weird ghostly images come out but do nothing, trees shake, red ropes fly around, Shu Qi spends a lot of time at the computer looking puzzled, Ekin is even more boring than usual and when it ends you sort of have to wonder - did they think this was scary or good? Too bad because Shu Qi looks great or did I mention that already?