Author Ting-yin (Angelica Lee; aka, Sinje Lee) has finished her love story trilogy & has had a film made of one volume. Her current project is a supernatural novel, & as she progresses, ghosts seem to be invading her life.

Re-Cycle (Gwai wik, 2006) from those twins Danny & Oxide Pang confirms their leading status as masters of cinematic weird fiction. Excellent cast & unsettling storyline gives Re-Cycle a classy feeling, even as the story that unfolds becomes increasingly wacky.

Ting-yin's old flame, who inspired her romantic trilogy, has returned after eight years to muck with her emotions. The soap opera bits work well in establishing character, but soon the film will be anything but soap. It'll come closer to being a surreal video game.

One day she steps out of the elevator into a garage & finds herself entering a post-apocolyptic world, pursued by the weirdest damned spirits. She flees toward what appears to be a sheer eternal cliff at the edge of the world.

The crumbling city of wasted ghosts or burnt zombies & broken stairways & horrific carnival rides make an extreme, creepy, baroque nightmare environment that defies reason & yet has dreamlike familiarity. The Pangs are brilliant at making something comprehensible out of the chaotic.

It's a world where abandoned thoughts & creations are recycled. Ting-yin has gained acess through her own discarded rough drafts for her novel in progress. Periodically the world of re-cycled creativity erodes into nothingness, & she must not remain in this world too long or she, too, may erode amidst discarded thoughts & objects & people.

Attacked by hanged zombies with stretched out necks, a child rides io her rescue on a giant toy horse, leading her into another realm of broken forgotten or discarded toys, here rendered monstrous in size.

To get back to the living world, the little girl explains, Ting-yin will have to find the place called "Transit." As the place of toys begins to erode, she & the child barely escape into the world of forgotten & discarded books.

Spirit guides like the child & her ghost-uncle (Lau Siu-Ming) assist Ting-yin on her quest for Transit.

But she falls into the giant womb of discarded fetuses, inhabited by half-formed & monstrously deformed babies that cry & watch her until the little girl spirit guide manages to get her out.

That segment comes off as an anti-abortion tirade & loses its story focus. Indeed, because each zone is like stepping through a series of gothic sets or paintings, or a cavalcade of surrealism while plot & story are otherwise on hold, it does get a tiny bit tedious after a while having random momentum rather than any sense of inevitably moving forward.

Our heroine begins to lose her sense of identity, feeling increasingly like a character trying to escape from the drafts of her own book, & not the actual author. So much of the film is artfully constructed of CGI, so that at times it feels like it should be regarded as anime with live actors inserted, an imaginative & effective mix.

The Pangs have done well what many modern young directors do badly. They rely on CGI; they create fantasy worlds with "rules" as though they have mistaken cinema for a game of Dungeons & Dragons; or they make the film look like a video game, weaving through a maze of strangeness to the winning-point of Transit.

And Re-Cycle does become much more video game than storytelling at times, a flaw since watching a video game is just not as involving as playing one. Still, the Pangs have done more with it than one might expect.

With these ingredients, ninety-nine out of a hundred directors would end up with a childish film, but the Pangs make it work. Finding, & trusting, meritorious actors is a great part of their success. A performance with conviction can make the absurd reasonable, the spectacle personal, with suspenseful result. They haven't made walking around in computer-art quite as human & real as Terry Gilliam has managed, but they're leaning in that direction.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl