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Looking for new, fresh motives for her pictures, photography student
Jin (Race Wong) suddenly finds a strange fascination in the macabre when
she happens upon a car crash and knows nothing better to do than take
photos of the dead victim. Soon she sees herself drawn more & more
into the world of macabre, even violent images, & occasionally even
starts seeing things, much to the concern of her girlfriend Jas (her real
life sister Rosanne Wong). It is only when Jin almost throws herself off a
high building that Jas learns why her friend is acting rather weird
lately: when she was about 5 years old, she was raped by her only slightly
older cousin, but when she told her mother (Michelle Mei Suet), she didn't
believe her ... & since has rather neglected her daughter. Jin
doesn't jump off the building after all, but the next day, when she sees
another girl hurling herself off a building to her death, she photographs
every detail quite immediately. Later a suiter, Anson (Anson Leung), who
has been long following her with his DV-cam, & who can't come to terms
with the fact that Jin just isn't interested, tops by her house, & she
knows nothing better to do than to cover him in fake blood & take
pictures of him, which pretty much freaks him out a bit ... Soon Jin
realizes that she loses grip with reality more & more, & calls on
Jas to help her, save her ... & Jas figures the only way to get better
is to call her mother (who is on a business trip far far away) & tell
her again about the rape (when Jin was around 6), & try to conince her
... which works beautifully, as after that, Jin is normal again ... until
a videotape is lieing on her doorstep that shows a girl chained to a
chair, & being brutally beaten up, then killed. At first, Jin &
Jas think this is a fake made by Anson as a clumsy attempt to win Jin over
after all, but he convinces them it was none of his doing ... The next
day, another tape lies on Jin's doorstep, & this time Jas is chained
to the chair, is brutally beaten up, then killed. But when Jin wants to
call the police, she has to realize whoever-it-is is already in the room,
& he knocks her out ... ... when Jin comes to again, she finds
herself chained to the chair from the video, surrounded by film &
photo cameras, & a hooded stranger brutally beats her up ... but
before he can kill Jin, she can, thanks to her former condition,
get into his mind, & persuade him to give her a kiss before dieing ...
to which occasion the killer foolishly enough puts his heae into a noose,
which gives Jin enough time to partially free herself, & suddenly the
tables are turned, & while the killer's head is caught in the noose,
Jin is soon free & beats him up, eventually kills him. Then she
unmasks him, and it is ... someone who was seen in the film only briefly
before & had no meaning to the earlier story (by the way, it was not
Jin's rapist cousin, whom she has pushed down some stairs to his death
years ago) ... But it seems, the relationship between jin & her
mother is healed at long last. Even it the movie seems to have
a emotionally involving story full of psychological abysses, style
definitely triumphs over substance here, & not to the best of results
... All macabre and/or violent images are shown with sufficient gloss
& panache, Jin's almost-descent into madness has an almost triplike
quality, but once storytelling sets in it seems that director Oxide Pang
Chun loses all interest in the script he has written himself ... best
example is when jin's life gets more & more out of hand, this is
accompanied by cool (if sometimes too perfect images), beu once she calls
her mother (as a sort of self-therapy), the camera juist fades out &
the next day she is cured. Same when Jin has to face the killer (who
doesn't enter the story until late in the film & then he neters rather
apruptly): his violence, & hsi fetishistic costume & gadgets are
shown in a way so appealing that you almost want to sit in the chair
instead of Jin (ok, probably not, but I think you get the point), when
he's finally unmasked though, the film couldn't care less about any kind
of explanation (other than that he was standing around in the film as an
extra before). Rather a pity, all that, because the story could have had
potential.
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