Re-Cycle

Gwai wik (2006), Hong Kong

Synopsis

Re-Cycle is one of the mostly well-achieved works of the Pang brothers (Danny and Oxide Pang), screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The film describes the story of a successful writer Tsui Ting-Yin (Angelica Lee) who founds herself with no inspiration for her new novel (entitled Re-Cycle), after writing one best-seller based on her own personal experiences. Battling against writer’s block and an obstinate publisher, her attempts to start the book appear to become even more dissipated with the reappearance of her former boyfriend after his divorce. After discarding a draft of the first chapter of the new book, a series of incidents start to happen in her own apartment, including mysterious phone calls and a few frightening elements that the Pang Brothers have previously proven to master.

Review

Until the release of Re-Cycle, the directors appeared to have struggled for a few years in order to achieve the same success obtained with The Eye. Following the predictable The Eye 2 and the absurd The Eye 10, Re-Cycle was mostly likely expected to continuously repeat the same formula and scares that have guaranteed before the success of the Pang Brothers. Therefore, when elements of The Eye, Dark Water and Ringu started to appear, I truly believed that Re-Cycle would most likely turned out to be just another unoriginal installment of the “series” and a new 108-minutes exercise of patience. The first thirty minutes, classifiable as tedious and predictable, have therefore comprised the supernatural long-haired woman cliché, the scene inside a lift as previously observed in The Eye, mysterious sounds from the other side of the phone, water running down walls, figures, shadows and endless calculable scares. Hopefully after thirty minutes the viewer is introduced to a new world in the Pang brothers’ universe and to a new series of elements where the viewer can no longer distinguish the line between horror and fantasy, leaving behind the concept of another (effortlessly created) ghost story.

From a technical point of view, the Pang Brothers have clearly surpassed themselves. Alongside with the plot, and Lee’s performance, the explosion of visual effects are the undoubtedly the third pillar of the movie. Visually superb, with a rich use of colour and a thin line between the opaque monochromatic tones and a few extremely saturated moments (as the screenshots above and below respectively demonstrate), Re-cycle is probably the most brilliantly masterpiece achieved by the Pang brothers in the technical field. Despite the vast number of events during the movie, the plot is conducted in a particularly slow pace up to the very end of the film. Angelica Lee is the main character of the film, delivering a particularly convincing and satisfactory performance, with only a few smaller roles being present during the whole movie. The character development follows the same path as the plot itself, which tends to be important when the movie depends on only one character. 

Re-cycle is still a good movie especially if one is able to disregard the exacerbated number of similar elements that are presented in the same movie. For someone who is not particularly familiarized with the directors’ universe, the Pang Brothers will prove to be genuinely competent in the Asian horror scene, providing a couple of particularly suspenseful and nerve-racking scenes. The movie is however able to write a conclusion for the successful formula that was pitifully dragged for too long after the release of The Eye.