For the love of God, someone get Shu Qi a new agent. That the woman has talent should be pretty much undisputed by now as she's shown her skills repeatedly while working with Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and yet she somehow keeps ending up being cast as eye candy in low grade, half written, poorly shot junk. This is a trend that needs to stop, and stop now.
Home Sweet Home represents the second time that Shu Qi has replaced Angelica Lee in a lesser sequel that bears no relationship to the original - the name was changed from Koma 2 late in the game when people quite rightly pointed out that this film has nothing whatsoever to do with Koma beyond both films starring Karena Lam - but while The Eye 2 at least boasted some impressive visual style and a thematic link to the original HSH has absolutely nothing to recommend it, managing to be inferior in every way to the already middling organ harvesting thriller Koma. This is just a bad, bad film.
Shu Qi stars as May, a young and very highly strung young woman purchasing her first home with her husband and three year old son. The move is unsettling from day one, with May's young son getting lost in the building and spotting a creepy figure leering up at him from beneath the elevator floor and May herself spotting a myserious figure climbing up an air vent. Day two gets worse when her son is kidnapped from a neighbourhood birthday party and the frantic mother is left scrambling to find her son when nobody believes her account of what happened.
On the plus side of this film ... well, there are no pluses, really. Let's move on to the minuses.
Right. Where to start. First of all Karena Lam's ghoulishly burnt and very deranged basement dwelling figure goes well beyond the bounds of what suspension of disbelief can ever hope to cover. She moves easily through garbage chutes, air ducts, water cisterns and the like with ease, climbing to the top of the building - often with a rather large child strapped on to her body - in less time than it takes to get there via elevator, and somehow does this without anyone in the heavily populated building, or the squad of police searching for the missing child, ever noticing with, of course, the exception of May who spots her within the first half hour or so of moving in.
Second, Shu Qi is absolutely wasted. Her role seems to consist largely of not talking to strangers (her mother would be so proud), screaming, fainting, taking hard falls and being checked in and out of hospital. When the film needs a bit of variety, it rains on her. And that's it. If you thought her part in The Eye 2 was under written, well that's positively robust next to this.
Next, the child. Run away kid! Come on! At least once try to run from the dirty crazy lady! And how come nobody other than his parents - who hear him plain as day - can hear him crying in the air ducts?
Next, the crazy lady herself. One, she is not frightening. At all. And when the film makers suddenly seem to realize that midway through and try to change gears and make her into a tragic figure the film derails hard. The rails it was on up until this point weren't particularly sturdy ones in the first place but there are no rails whatsoever once they try to make this work. Crazy women who lock children in half filled cisterns, feed them moldy apple cores and hospitalize the parents who try to save said children just aren't sympathetic characters and that someone would try to generate sympathy for them is somewhat baffling.
Basically what's wrong with this film is everything. The script is atrocious, the camera work uninspired, the editing strictly workmanlike and the performances generally quite bad despite the film being stocked with veteran actors who really should have known better.