REVIEW: WRITTEN BY - another take

Wai Ka Fai clearly has a penchant for the supernatural. His directorial collaborations with Johnnie To (MAD DETECTIVE, RUNNING ON KARMA) often explore spiritual, philosophical and fantastic themes that To, when flying solo, tends to eschew in favour of more grounded, if super-stylised, interpretations of reality. When Wai works alone, however, the results can often be a little more haphazard.

In WRITTEN BY, regular leading man Lau Ching Wan plays Tony, a successful lawyer and family man, who is killed in a car accident. While his wife, Mandy (Kelly Lin) and young son Oscar walk away physically unharmed, his daughter Melody loses her sight. Ten years later and the family are still grieving the loss of their patriarch, so Melody (now played by Yam Mia) takes it upon herself to resurrect her father in the form of a novel, in the hope of healing her family's wounds.

In Melody's fictionalised version of events, Tony survives the crash, but is left blind, while the rest of the family is killed. He begins to write a novel of his own, in which his family return to him. Mandy prepares his favourite meals, while young Melody converts the nearby Peak Tram into the Underworld Express, a spectral vessel that carries souls to the afterlife for reincarnation, at the behest of her new mistress, the grim reaper-esque Meng Por (Jo Koo).

Seeing Tony struggle to care for himself, his family whisk him off to the cemetery where they recreate their family home – but this is all part of Melody's novel. Before long, the lines between fantasy and reality, fact and fiction, even life and death become indiscernibly blurred as the Tong family struggle to reunite, in any plain of existence available.

In this respect, credit must go to writer/director Wai and his co-writer Au Kin Yee. Although his characters are regularly fooled into thinking they are living in one version of reality when they are in fact trapped in another, the film remains pretty easy to follow throughout, even with at least 3 different worlds running simultaneously. It should also be noted that for a film dealing with ghosts for almost its entire duration, WRITTEN BY is not a horror film. Wai is not interested in scaring his audience, rather he wants to explore the thesis that humans and ghosts are two sides of the same coin, forever side-by-side, yet never able to happily co-exist. However, for every moment of insightful philosophising, Wai leaves half a dozen other questions unanswered.

Lau Ching Wan is an effortlessly engaging protagonist, making his grieving, blind and quite possibly dead hero a likeable and often amusing character. Kelly Yin isn't given a great deal to do as his wife Mandy, but Yam Mia does a fair job of making Melody sympathetic as the one seemingly orchestrating these attempts to get her family back together.

The main problem with WRITTEN BY stems from the very same philosophical conundrums that Melody herself is asking throughout. It is all well and good creating fantasy worlds to escape into and alternate realities where tragedy never strikes and nobody ever dies, but in the real world all that means nothing. Out there, fate plays a part and if we are no longer in control, who then decides who lives and who dies?

The fundamental problem with a story that functions on numerous plains of reality, which is being continuously altered and re-written by the characters as they go along, is that it becomes difficult for the audience to remain emotionally invested in the story and the characters. People die, are brought back to life, are replaced by other characters and at one point, turned into a dog. Call me heartless, but if nothing is real, nothing is for certain and anything that happens to any character can be undone (we see one character commit suicide three times in as many minutes), how can I be expected to care about what happens to any of them?