RE-CYCLE
DVD. Cine Du Monde.

The Pang Brothers can be infuriatingly inconsistent – on the one hand capable of quality supernatural horror like The Eye and n the other, responsible for fairly throwaway efforts like Omen. Re-Cycle, made in 2006 but only now hitting UK DVD, is one of their more interesting efforts – though parts of it left a rather bad taste in my mouth.

Angelica Lee stars as romantic novelist Chu Xun, who is struggling with her latest novel, a supernatural thriller. This is unsurprising, as – at least in the English subtitles – her writing is frankly terrible and her story, complete with longhaired female ghosts, rather clichéd. But as her work and her private life start to get on top of her, she begins to notice some strange ghostly events in her home, often relating to her own story. Before long, she exits a lift and finds herself through the rabbit hole and into a strange world of decaying buildings, zombies and ghosts – a world of the discarded, where people, places and even thoughts long abandoned end up. Helped by a little girl, she makes her way through this world searching for a way out before she is trapped forever.

Visually impressive – the CGI effects are first rate and thankfully not over-played – the film seems like a cross between a video game, moving through various levels with puzzles to solve, and a rather warped Alice in Wonderland story. It’s short on plot, instead allowing a series of unconnected incidents to push the story along, but the set-pieces are very well done, and the denizens of this strange world seem both pathetic and threatening.

But there’s a central point in the story that made me a little uncomfortable. At one point, Chu Xan finds herself in a tunnel full of foetuses and babies – the unborn children of women who have had abortions. Without spoiling the end of the film, this turns out to have a specific connection to our heroine - and the implication is that these foetuses are victims – discarded people. It’s the sort of message I imagine right-wing pro-life groups would applaud, and I found it rather disagreeable. I may be exaggerating this – certainly, I’ve seen no evidence of anyone else picking up on it – but I thought it was blatant and crass.

It’s this that stops me from whole-heartedly recommending the film. But it shouldn’t stop you from checking it out yourself – on the whole, this is a bold attempt to do something fresh with the Asian ghost story tradition, and has much to enjoy after a fairly slow start.

DAVID FLINT

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