|
Review
by Kozo: |
Horror films and China censorship: two things that do not go great together. So it is with Herman Yau’s Nightmare, a psychological chiller that does all sorts of backflips, contortions and acrobatics to avoid pissing off SARFT. The result is a film that’s never conclusive about its details or resolution and wraps its reveals in so many layers of psychosis that even if someone were to state the film’s meaning, someone else could easily debunk it. Maybe SARFT just passed Nightmare because they were tired of arguing about it. Huang Xuan stars as Dong Zi, an insomniac who sometimes spends his nights watching his comely neighbor suffer her own insomnia. He peeps at her through her curtain-less windows while she paints creepy pictures of a scary long-haired woman with a bloody gash on her forehead. Then someone slashes her with a knife and throws her off her balcony. Dong Zi witnesses the whole thing so he’s not too happy.
Unfortunately, there’s no body, no witnesses and the girl’s apartment has long been vacant. Dong Zi is right flummoxed by the confusing details, but luckily he has a radio show host cum psychologist for a girlfriend. Yi Fan (Fiona Sit) lovingly counsels Dong Zi on his hallucinations, but not before he takes a trip back to rural Nine Mile Village, where he was raised and where his grandmother recently died. His uncle Feng (Tao Hai) lives there alone and puts Dong Zi in an old bedroom to stay the night. Unfortunately, spectral visions and loud sounds torture Dong Zi there too, and when he ventures into the night he sees another woman getting stabbed and killed. Suddenly he’s back in Yi Fan’s office and getting schooled on the ins-and-outs of repressed memory. Or is he really back in Nine Mile Village? And why does he imagine himself as a child? Which is the dream world and which is the waking one? And does any of this really matter?
Don’t worry, Nightmare isn’t as confusing as it sounds, thanks to the relatively solid storytelling from Herman Yau. The film opens with portentous atmosphere and unexplained phenomena before detouring to Yi Fan’s therapist’s couch where exposition is welcome and necessary. The film takes a further turn at Nine Mile Village, where an unsolved crime from the past may figure into Dong Zi’s issues. Nightmare possesses a decent enough mystery such that one may stick around for answers, though said answers aren’t new. The horror-thriller genre has lacked innovation for a while, and with extreme style or content not allowed, it’s hard to imagine Herman Yau doing better than he does here. Yau isn’t really a stylist anyway, and doesn’t sensationalize the story. Settings are real and not expressionistic, costumes doubly so, and editing is used for storytelling rather than montage. At times Nightmare hews closer to Yau’s low-key nineties horror efforts, e.g., the Troublesome Night films.
If there’s any novelty in Nightmare, it’s the plot’s constant shifting between waking and dream states. Numerous times, the film tries to surprise us by having Dong Zi escape sticky situations by waking up from a dream. Or was it a dream within a dream within a hallucination? Who really knows? Nightmare is near Inception-like with its jumps to and from the dream world, though this is obviously a much cheaper and less interesting film. Towards the end, Nightmare delivers twist after fake-out after reveal, such that nothing seems to be real or matter anymore – not even the film’s purported romance. For what it is, Nightmare is an OK diversion — though, unlike other Herman Yau films, it doesn’t offer any hidden wit or intelligence. This is just one for hire, and it shows in Yau’s solid professionalism and the film’s utter lack of substance. Nightmare isn’t the worst China horror around but it’s entirely unmemorable. You know, just like a dream.
(Kozo, 2012) |
|
