RE-CYCLE (GWAI WIK)
It’s been five years since the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (Gin gwai) scared the shit out of me, and I’ve been losing love for the directors ever since - seemingly stuck on Retread, each of their Eye sequels got worst as they went along, there was that terrible Jessica Alba remake (not their fault, to be fair), their English-language The Messengers was another weak and derivative ghost story, and now they’ve taken to remaking their 1999 cult hit Bangkok Dangerous with Nicholas Cage (which begs the question - don’t they know what happened the last time Cage was in a remake of a cult classic?). So it was with some trepidation that I caught the Egyptian’s screening of Re-Cycle (Gwai wik) last night, the Pang Brothers’ 2006 horror/fantasy that hasn’t seen a full American distribution yet.
Starting off as a standard and not particularly compelling spook fest (creepy long-haired woman in the shadows! creepy phone calls from beyond!), Re-Cycle veers suddenly into a surreal hybrid of What Dreams May Come and MirrorMask. Without warning or much explanation (and to the film’s credit, the explanation does come), our heroine Tsui Ting-Yin (played by The Eye’s Angelica Lee), a successful writer working on a novel about the supernatural, finds herself in a dark and seemingly post-apocalyptic nightmare world, complete with eerie ghosts, giant toys, and a journey through one hell of a giant uterus. She joins up with a sweet and scrappy little girl, as one tends to do when plunged into strange and surreal wonderlands, and the two set off to make their way through the wasteland together.
Sounds interesting, right? Re-Cycle does excel in its technical and artistic ingenuity - the visuals and sound of this film are incredibly impressive, especially upon learning that the film cost only 5 Million to make. Like The Eye, the film’s large scope and ideas are seeped in Chinese culture and tradition, with themes of Honor presenting themselves throughout (honoring the dead, honoring ideas, honoring the past). I was with the film at these moments, appreciating the subtlelty of the message while drooling over the grandeur of the visuals.
These moments were few and far between, however - overall the film was surprisingly drab and too structurally unhinged to be particularly effective. I found myself resenting the fact that the filmmakers abandoned structure in favor of pouring their fantastic visuals onto the screen - as evidenced by The Matrix and even their own The Eye, it is possible to have both. This film ran more like Aronofsky’s The Fountain and Dave McKean’s MirrorMask, two films I respect the visuals of even as I’m checking my watch.
And like those films, no doubt Re-Cycle will find its legion of fans. That is, if they’re able to get past the largely predictable revelation that, depending on your take on the film, either completely betrays the integrity of the film, or gives it its soul. Personally, I had to hold back a guilty chuckle, especially when the prerequisite dramatic music cued up (my sister, on the other hand, heartedly let her chuckle out - it was her only defense). Part of why I loved The Eye so much is because there was very little I saw coming - the murky elements of Re-Cycle reveal themselves very slowly, but it’s not long before you’re able to put it all together. And it all adds up to something very familiar, not too intriguing, sadly obvious, and as some have criticized, somewhat unwelcome and offensive.
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