DVD Review: Re-Cycle
Re-Cycle is something of a departure for Hong Kong horror kings the Pang brothers. The movie begins as a decently creepy (if conventional) horror flick, but forty minutes in it reveals itself to be dark fantasy in disguise, with visuals that can’t help but draw comparisons to Guillermo del Toro’s wonderfully nightmarish visions. Unfortunately, Re-Cycle lacks the heart behind del Toro’s work and comes off as ponderous and heavy-handed.
Ting-Yian is a popular romance novelist who is taking a different tack with her newest book, Re-Cycle, a supernatural thriller. But she’s having a hard time getting started; we see her write and discard several drafts of her female protagonist. To complicate matters, her old boyfriend is back in town after eight years, recently divorced and looking to hook up again. Ting-Yian begins seeing a ghostly form in her apartment, receives strange phone calls and finds locks of hair in the tub that are far too long to be hers- but which match her aborted description of her main character. Is she being haunted by someone who is only supposed to exist in her imagination?
The story takes an even more bizarre turn when Ting-Yian returns home from dinner one night to find her apartment building has become a strange, bleak fantasy world. The world’s inhabitants are abandoned things: lost toys, left-behind places, neglected people, and rejected ideas, including her main character. The character leads a group of zombies who are out to get Ting-Yian. Her only hope of escape lies in the Transit, where a door connects this world to our own. Her guide is a little girl with no name who seems determined to save Ting-Yian, even if it means her own destruction. The two traipse through a series of tableaus illustrating the various kinds of abandonments: the dead who have been forgotten by their descendants, a cave of aborted fetuses, a landscape of giant lost toys. In between they flee the forces of ‘recycling’- a nod to the Buddhist concept of death and rebirth. Why these forces are so frightening is never explained; to be plucked from the depressing realm of the Abandoned and reborn into the human world seems a win-win situation for the dimension’s inhabitants.
To be sure, Re-Cycle is a clever film, and the bait-and-switch of horror to fantasy is a welcome change from the conventions of the horror genre. But Re-Cycle fails to satisfy for several reasons: the genre switch comes nearly halfway through the movie, and because of that its abruptness is jarring and the dimension of the Abandoned never seems real. The visual effects, while impressive, seem flat and lifeless due to the fact that almost all of them are computer-generated. The characters are also flat and lifeless; even the revelation that Ting-Yian has been brought to this world due to an incident in her past fails to move- instead it turns into a heavy-handed moral message. Many parts of the film move at a glacial pace, and the hordes of moaning zombies that continuously attack Ting-Yian and the little girl fail to be menacing after the first four or five incidents. Finally, the end of Re-Cycle attempts to make a return to horror, with a scene that is both confusing and pointless; it appears to be some sort of open ending, but open to what?
Re-Cycle isn’t all bad, though. The concept of a dimension full of abandoned things and people is certainly intriguing, and the reason for Ting-Yian’s being there is thoughtful and surprising, if clumsily handled. The acting is also decent, is not spectacular.
Numerous people have said that they disliked Re-Cycle on the first viewing, but came to appreciate it much more on the second. That may be true, but I doubt I’ll get around to watching it again. The Pang brothers have conducted in interesting experiment with this movie, but I think that ultimately it proves they should stick to horror.
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