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Jiney (Race Wong) is a pretty and talented upcoming and awarded student photographer.
Despite her photography genius, she still feels unsatisfied with her finished product. Until she witnesses a car accident where a pedestrian dies.
Shocked at first, her natural impulse to capture the scene on film takes over and she soon realizes the thrill and fulfillment when the photographs are developed. She starts concentrating on near deaths, tragic accidents and the like as her subject. She begins to manipulate the photographs by adding blood and gore. But running out of tragedies to capture, she fights the strong urge to help people meet their untimely deaths and that leads her to a mental breakdown. Jas (Roseanne Wong), her best friend, manages to pull her up before she falls into a state of psychosis. However, just as soon as she returns to normalcy, she starts receiving mysterious videotapes on torture and death. She realizes that hers is not the only obsession to capture cruelty and gory deaths as art.
The film has a lot of clever camerawork and suggestive lighting and heightens the eeriness of the
already spine-chilling story. Although there is profuse blood soaking and spilling, complementing the macabre events of torture and death, the filmmakers succeed in adding
elegance to the scenes with the play of colors, angles and lighting, as well as an unsettling scoring. Overall, the movie is truly morbid and unsettling, however; it is
noteworthy that filmmakers center as well on understanding what goes on inside the mind of the protagonist and not only on her consequential actions.
Race Wong tackles the role with much depth and passion. The first part of the movie is quite slow but fascinating, unraveling the mystery of the protagonist's psychological make-up. The second part takes a swift shift into a more generic horror plot and ends a little bit disappointing. There are some narrative lapses but ultimately can be forgiven because of the directorial depth and artistry.
Finding beauty in death is perfectly normal and even poetic if death is associated with peace and
embracing one's ultimate destiny. However, fascination with death because of brutality and violence is definitely a sign of psychological and moral disturbance.
If the focus of an art (or any visual presentation) is the grotesque details that underline human cruelty and disrespect for life, then this merely becomes an excuse to tap into a person's threshold for violence and sell sensationalism. Mass media and some pseudo artists too indolent to be creative and too impatient to hang on to decency merely use violence and play up on morbidity to present and sell their work. There can never be an excuse to feature dismembered corpses sprawled on ground, blood splattered everywhere while apathetic nosy bystanders press their noses to be included in the scene. The idea is sickening. Perhaps what is more disturbing is the fact that society is constantly raising its threshold of tolerance for violence and gory deaths to a point of not only passive acceptance but worse, active fascination. Parental guidance required for gruesome scenes and ideas of a lesbian relation.
(Date Reviewed: 11 November 2005)
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