Trying to balance horror and drama is not always a good choice.
In this case, the drama was far more engaging than the scares. The story about a female lead learning from the beginning how to view the world would probably work better as a slice of life - at least with the scenes presented in this movie. Loved to see how she still needs to assist herself with other senses, because she doesn't know how to fully depend on her eyesight.Even the drama related to the cause of the nightmare reality she needs to face was great. Diving deeper and in more detail in these stories would be amazing.
And the horror? Mediocre at best. They did not deliver the scares, nor the true suspense.
Acting itself was good. My favorite performance must be Yut Lai So as Ying Ying. Adorable actress and heartbreaking tale.
For the production, you can feel it's 2002 movie based on the special effects. What’s more? They thought they were clever with the braille credits, but nope, it was dumb
Overall, neither the story nor the horror was that well written and presented. While I was not bored, I was not that interested either.
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This review may contain spoilers
Some things are better left unseen, indeed.
I am a huge fan of horror movies, especially Asian horror movie production is my favourite and my friends don't want to watch any horror movies with me since Kairo (2001), which I honestly understand. So you can imagine I was excited for this movie, been seeing posts about how this movie ranked #1 few times, how creepy it is... Well, I was quite dissapointed.N O T S P O I L E R F R E E / N O M A J O R S P O I L E R S
Kar Mun lost her vision when she was little, spending years living in a haze, not knowing how her own face looks like. Now at 18yo she got a chance to have her vision repaired with corneal transplantation, risky, yet in the end succesful and she can start learning to recognize things not by touch, smell or sound, but by looking at them. Kar Mun is ready to see all the beautiful things this world has to offer, except she starts seeing thing in the corner of her eye, figures that no one else sees or can talk to. It's quite maddening experience for someone, who just got back their sight, so she decides to look into who donated the cornea to her. Hopefully that would explain what is happening to her...
I definitely liked the gloomy atmosphere, the dark and grim colour palette, some of the shots were pretty good and you could feel how the heroin was slowly sinking into despair. Unfortunatelly the movie tried too hard to deliver some jump scares, scary scenes weren't working for me, because I could tell what to expect. The creepiest shot was the ghost lady with her kid standing at the restaurant, licking the meat, that gave me the ick, other than that... Won't probably even watch the rest of this saga. The concept is good, but I would rather invest my time into something else.
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This film lived up to my expectations, it's wellcrafted, got some pretty dang good jumpscare that i haven't seen in ages that makes me goes shriek in the middle of the night, I love how this film keeps on giving me goosebumps and also maintains its tension throughout the film.
This film really takes advantage of what the main character has and executes it properly to spread terror, to be honest there are many films that feature ghosts that haunt but not to the point of making goosebumps or scary as in this film, where the character Mun is said to have been blind since she was a baby and only got to see when she was an adult after she got a corneal donor, but from someone who can see ghosts (how unlucky she is), Throughout the film we see her suffering with her eyes at being able to see ghosts where it affects her psychologically, where the ending feels acceptable.
Despite how good this film was to me overall,I really only like the first and second act, where there are many memorable moments of horror from the grim reaper to the moment in the elevator and there is still a sense of Hong Kong. The third act turned out to be like a thai horror film, the vibe, and even the cinematography changed. The changes weren't really harmful, it was just that the transition was a bit of a drag for me.
Overall, one the scariest asian horror film.
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