This horror/sci-fi film comes from the Hong Kong filmmakers Oxide and Danny Pang, who are best known for making the Chinese horror film THE EYE. The story places a writer in a fantasy world where her discarded ideas go. Writers discard a lot of ideas. Like a writers trash bin this film is filled with a bunch of disjointed and under developed ideas.
Ting-yin (Angelica Lee, THE EYE) is the successful writer of a series of romance novels. She’s having trouble coming up with new material and her publisher is eager to get another book from the hot writer on shelves. In a very unfair push during a press conference for the film adaptation of her love stories, her agent Lawrence (Laurence Chou, THE EYE) announces that her new book is titled “The Recycle” and will deal with supernatural themes. Ting-yin gets to work on the new book, but isn’t satisfied. During the writing, she seems to be plagued by inexplicable events. Finally she decides to delete her novel and start over. Once she does she’s transported into the world she created, trapped within a series of her rejected things.
The Pangs' style is to build slow tension and then pound the audience with their soundtrack. It successfully builds tension at first but it loses its impact after a while, because there is nothing behind the scares. The threat against Ting-yin is too enigmatic. Then once she crosses over into the world of discarded ideas, the film once again gains an eerie tension with its remarkably grim production design. The creepiness of the dilapidated landscape is only enhanced by the strange occurrences that happen… like dead bodies falling from the sky. But once again these scares loose their effect once we get accustomed to the surreal world and nothing of substance drives the tension.
It’s an interesting idea a world constructed of the ideas that never made it. I could see Stephen King writing something similar. But the Pang Brothers aren’t satisfied with the world being made of just ideas. Forgotten and discarded elements of the real world sneak in as well. The path Ting-yin travels is supposed to mirror her psychological state, but we know very little about her so it means little until it’s told to us in flashbacks in the end. The Pangs want to keep secrets, but they keep too many secrets at the same time showing their cards with clunky foreshadowing. Because Ting-yin is a blank slate and because anything can happen in the fantasy world, we feel lost in a story with no tether leading us through whether emotionally or thematically. And once the explanations come nothing that came before earns the high drama and weighty material.
Ting-yin is struggling with something serious and the film addresses some sensitive areas in a late reveal. If you’ve read anything about the film you know the issue, because it has caused controversy. With how heavy it lays on the melodrama, it’s hard not to feel the film is taking a stance, however the Pangs claim it’s apolitical. That attitude underlines the feeling their entire film creates. The film is re-cycled from ideas and images that the Pangs couldn’t make an entire feature out of so they pieced them all together in this film.
And let’s not talk about the twist ending, which simply graphs another completely random concept onto the last shot.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
