Re-cycle (Screen Daily Review)

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Re-cycle


Lee Marshall in Cannes 06 June 2006 04:00

Directed by Danny & Oxide Pang. Hong Kong/Thailand 2006. 108 mins.

This Lin Sinjee vehicle is a calling card for the Far Eastern special effects industry, creating a persuasively dark Alice Through the Looking Glass parallel universe with shades of Terry Gilliam, Spirited Away and What Dreams May Come.

But the moody fright-power of the Pang brothers’ breakout hit The Eye is lacking here, and what is left is a good-looking but ultimately fairly hollow cross-genre exercise that has more DVD potential than theatrical clout. Adventurous distributors such as Tartan (which pre-bought the film at script stage) will have to pitch this at niche Asian and horror fans and hope for the best.

The conventional opening act shows successful novelist Ting-yin (Sinjee) fielding press conference questions about the connection between her life and work.

She’s pained by the return of a lover from the distant past, and keen to get on with her new book, a supernatural yarn called Re-cycle.

But Ting-yin gradually loses her cool, spooked out by an alien presence in her apartment which seems to be guiding her inspiration, or preying on it.

Deleted passages of her novel re-emerge, and an increasingly rattled Ting-yin wonders whether she’s writing or being written.

The psychological tension of this section – which has the film’s highest jump-in-your-seat count – seems to herald a controlled Eye-like crescendo.

But then the film enters an entirely different register when a sleeping Ting-yin actually enters the fictional world that she has created.

The effects and production design are so muscular and ravishing here that we are swept along for a while, marvelling at the dark funfair strung out between the crumbling tenements of a ghostly, abandoned Asian metropolis, or the room of lost books, which cascade from above like falling chestnuts.

It soon becomes muddily clear that this otherworld is the equivalent of the computer’s recycle bin: a jetsam universe of discarded ideas, things and people – including a gooey red cave of aborted foetuses.

It’s a clever idea, but one that derails the film’s psychic tension and converts it into mere spectacle.

Ting-yin finds a mysterious little girl here, and the two are required to pass various tests on their way to the Transit, the customs post between this imagined world and the real one. Lin Sinjee is good at looking terrified – just as well, because this is her default mode as she ricochets from one threat to the next. But for the audience, this whole fantasy section provides car-chase thrills rather than serious horror shocks.

With its sharp editing, washed-out colours and FX panache, Re-cycle wings it for a long while.

But even by horror and/or fantasy standards, the story structure is frustratingly unresolved: at some point, the brothers Pang lose sight of their initial writers-block premise and steer the film towards a fable of maternal remorse that would delight the Catholic Church.

A shame, because the journey itself has moments of visual genius. Re-cycle is a tasty but unfilling nibble that whets the appetite for the brothers’ first English-language horror outing, The Messengers.





Production companies

Universe Entertainment Ltd (HK)

Matching Motion Pictures Company Ltd (Thailand)

Co-producers

Magic Head (Thailand)

Int’l sales

Universe Films Distribution

US distributor: Tartan US

Producers

Danny & Oxide Pang

Alvin Lam

Sangar Chatchairungruang

Screenplay

Danny & Oxide Pang

Pak Sing Pang

Sam Lung

Cub Chien

Cinematography

Decha Srimantra

Creative director

Ng Yuen Fai

Editors

Danny & Oxide Pang

Curran Pang

Music

Payont Permsith

Main cast

Lee Sinje

Lau Siu Ming

Zeng Qi Qi

Rain Li

Lawrence Chow

Jetrin Wattanasin