The House (Hung chak, 2005) is really "the apartment house" so I do wonder a bit about how well the title was translated. Jane Ching (Maggie Siu), & her daughter Ling (Lai Wai-Han) move into a run-down cheap-rent apartment & do a lot of cleaning to make it liveable.

Electronic equipment acts up & the small gas stove is creepy even before it does anything. Young Ling knows there's something wrong with the place, but there's no place else they could've afforded, & mom goes little hysterical when Ling suggested they move somewhere else at once.

The skillful acting, the moody cinematography with superb lighting, eerie sound FX & subtle musical score, all make the haunted house motif captivating rather than "just" the same old haunted house. Plus mom & Ling are very likeable realistic characters with rough edges & brave dispositions.

Mom was followed home by a dark-visaged scary young man who is manifestly insane. But is he dangerous? He seems to have some familiarity with the small apartment house, & won't go inside.

A police officer, Wai (Eddie Cheung Siu Fae), visits the mother & daughter. He's a man full of guilt & sadness, having killed Jane's addict husband Kam (Wayne Lai Yiu Cheung) in a justified shooting. But justified or not, he feels responsible for their current financial plight. And if he has fallen in love with Jane, how sick is that, to try to move in on a woman he caused to be widowed. His own decency means he doesn't dare.

Jane has ambiguous feelings about losing her husband. Kam, a violent man, used to beat her. But now as a widowed mom, life's even harder.

She finally gets a job, but this means leaving Ling alone a lot. The dark-visaged loony hangs around, wanting to warn her or protect her but not being very good at anything but scaring her.

Alone all night, Ling encounters the ghost of a little boy who is soaking wet, who had been drowned in the bathtub, very likely by his own mother. The second ghost is a young woman in Chinese opera costume. The pale wet boy & the opera girl make for an ultra-spooky ghostly pairing, two "gwai" or hungry-ghosts whose presence can't bode anything but ill.

Jane's job as a night-guard means she, too, is alone at night. And it could well be that something ghostly follows her to & from work. The ghost-mother seems to be seeping into her, becoming part of her, effecting her moods.

It becomes more & more evident that whatever happened to the boy & the opera ghost will be re-enacted by Jane against her daughter. But Jane refuses to believe the cause of her harmful behavior is the apartment itself. She's guilt-ridden with her inability to control her temper.

The loony man, the mopy policeman, the mother & the little girl are drawn inexorably into the awful fates of the dead tenants. The elements of the film are pretty common to Asian horror, overpopulated as they are by exactly such wet ghosts, spooky child ghosts, & deadly long-haired female ghosts, but it all goes together so well in The House that it is an excellent-of-kind horror flick.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl