Grief-stricken souls find themselves trapped in a hazy dreamworld of haunting guilt and vengeful spirits in Kelvin Shum’s eerie supernatural horror, It Remains (釀魂). Shum’s second feature following noirish psychological thriller Deliverance delves into the realms of classic ghost movies but discovers its heroes mainly haunted by the unresolved past. “We’re all afraid of facing reality,” heartbroken waiter Finn (Anson Lo) finally accepts though perhaps still lacking resolve to move on from his tragedy.
That would be the death in a car accident of his girlfriend of five years, Ava (Summer Chan). Finn was supposed to meet her for an anniversary dinner but got busy with work and left her sitting alone at which point she left and had a collision with fate. Unable to forgive himself, Finn has taken to drinking and is in a grief-stricken stupor. In an attempt to cheer him up, his friends from the restaurant where he works, chef Luke (Tommy Chu Pak-Hong), waiter Liam (Ng Siu-Hin), and Cora (Kwok Tsui-Yee) from front of house, are taking him camping only the location Liam has chosen turns out to be a little different than expected. Fetching up on a remote island where the boats only run every few days, the gang find themselves wandering through an eerie, seemingly abandoned village where it seems a wedding was once taking place.
As might be expected, they don’t really want to hang around to find out what happened here and are in any case told to leave in no uncertain terms by a mysterious woman and an angry old man who say this village is closed off to insiders. But with no way off the island they have little choice other than to hole up in an abandoned house and try to make the best of the situation. That becomes admittedly difficult when they start experiencing strange visions and are pulled back towards their own unresolved, internalised grief.
It seems Finn wasn’t the only one struggling to let go of the past and whatever evil lurks here quickly latches on to the buried anxieties of each of the group attempting to manipulate them to unleash a pent up spirit sealed away for good reason. Though clues scattered around the abandoned village point to something further in the past and indeed more ancient, it appears this particular moment of trauma occurred this century even if the darkness that surrounds it is older and apparently imparted by a passing Tibetan monk. Someone here also could not face reality and has been caught in another kind of limbo trapped alone and unable to resolve their pain.
The film’s Chinese title means something like “wine ghost” which is in its way ironic seeing as the main coping mechanism employed not just by Finn is alcohol, while the evil spirit itself is bound in a wine jar. This is however one jar it’s best not to open and a series a ghosts that should not be unleashed, despite the well honed logic that sealing the spirit is not really enough to keep it from ruining your life. Finn and the others are too afraid to face reality in knowledge that it may consume them and so remain trapped in the past though they may have been right to fear that in the end they would not be able to resolve their grief if they opened the jar and attempted to deal with it.
Swapping the noirish urbanity of his previous film for the eeriness of nature found in misty forests and forbidding signs of human absence, Shum conjures an atmosphere of spiritual dread in which each of the protagonists is plunged into their own kind of hell and forced to confront the unresolved past. Hoping to deal with at least one ghost, Cora performs a Taoist ritual but ends up summoning more spirits than intended and opening the door to something that none of them are able to control. There’s more than one way to quell a ghost, but the desire not to may be equally strong and for some moving on may not be what they actually want. Facing reality is to accept it, but it’s difficult to say if that represents liberation or constraint or if the only way to deal with a wandering ghost is to join it in eternal suffering.
It Remains opens in UK cinemas on 3rd November courtesy of CineAsia.
UK trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 