Review Of MISSING
The idea is intriguing. A headless body, an ancient sunken city, a haunted woman, a mystery in the deep. But everyone's by now familiar with Tsui Hark's inconsistency as a director. His best films - The Blade, Time And Tide, Peking Opera Blues - hit all the right notes. His mediocre ones always have some ingredient missing. But the ironically titled Missing has what I would say, too many ingredients.
Malaysian-born Hong Kong scream queen Angelica Lee Sin-jie plays Dr Ko who falls in love with an undersea photographer, Kwok-tung (Guo Xiaodong). He plans to take her to an ancient sunken city where he has hidden a ring, which he will use to propose to her. But tragedy strikes, and Kwok-tung's headless body is brought back to Hong Kong. No one knows what happened in the ocean, and neither does Ko, who has lost her memory of the incident. Ko decides to be hypnotised by Dr Tong (Tony Leung Ka-fai) in an attempt to dig up the lost memory. But the hypnosis revealed that Ko may have multiple personality disorder.
Later, one of Ko's patients, Simon (Chang Chen), who claims to have the ability to see dead people, tells her that her dead lover has been in contact with him. Pretty soon, she also develops the Eye and starts seeing spirits of the dead around her. One day, Kwok-tung's head is discovered and given to Ko, but it seems something from the deep has followed them back. Soon, everyone close to Ko starts to die one by one.
The story has all the makings of a great supernatural thriller, but Tsui Hark doesn't quite pull off his attempt to mash up genres and moods. The feeling of disjointedness makes Missing seem like four different movies. It starts off as something of an undersea romance-thriller, then moves into pure horror-ghost story, before morphing into a psychological thriller, then into pure romance. There are elements from The Eye, Ju-On, and even horror road movie Dead End and Ghost. Make no mistake, there's nothing wrong in mashing up genres, as many other directors have done and successfully too. The one Hong Kong film that I can remember attempting the same with much success is Ringo Lam's Victim, which had everything from horror to crime thriller to even a heist!
Missing does start off very well; the scene at Kwok-tung's funeral is indeed very, very creepy. But the "horror segment" of the film feels terribly unneeded, with scares that we've become too familiar with. It's especially redundant when the "twist" is revealed halfway. No spoilers here, but let's just say it's as incongruous as the dreaded oh-it's-just-a-dream twist.
But it's very clear what Tsui Hark reaches for here. The main concern of the story is the two people at the centre of everything - two lovers for whom everything comes too little, too late. It could be a very poignant love story, and Angelica Lee delivers as always, with a strong, moving performance. This is one actress whose incredible talent has mostly been wasted in mediocre movies. It's time someone gave her a vehicle to put her always-solid performance to good use! It's really frustrating to see, time and again, that there's no concrete story with which she could anchor her amazing talent.
Instead, Tsui Hark has her playing a long, drawn out Demi Moore-Patrick Swayze-type scene with a CGI ghost.
What we have in the end is one great actress and a promising story, but a director who tries to do too much and ultimately overcooks the plot.
