The Pang Brothers have shown that they can do tough (Bangkok Dangerous) and they can do spooky (The Eye).  At first it looks as though this time they are doing some genteel drama leading to spooky.

A moody novelist is at the press conference after the screening of the first adaptation of one of her books.  The title of the next is announced: Re-cycle.  However, she has not really begun it.

Back in her apartment, water overflows from a bath (the Pangs have seen Dark Waters), the phone rings mysteriously (the Pangs have seen the Ring films).  Is this what they mean by ‘re-cycling’?  Then the ghosts start to appear and we find that we have been misjudging them altogether.  What follows is a cinematic tour-de-force of imagination and effects.

If you want to know what a phantasmagoria is and see a very stylishly produced one, this is it.  At the end, reincarnation is mentioned and mysteriously visualised.  The phantasmagoria is akin to Dante’s tour of the inferno and the purgatorio (not very much paradise at all), an other-world divine comedy.  The impact is overpowering, overwhelming.  There is a pounding score and sound engineering to match.

At the core of the journey, where our novelist is advised by a grandfather figure and then led out of mazes to ‘The Transit’ to this world by a little girl is the neglect of ancestor worship.  The novelist experiences a horrendous attack by ghoulish spurned ancestors.  More central is her journey through a blood and fiery red environment like blood cells and the womb.  It is here that aborted babies survive and grow.  This segment is frighteningly powerful.

What begins as ‘we’ve seen this before’ moves into a film that we’ve never seen before, quite a cinematic achievement.

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