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I saw this one on Fantasporto 2007, in Porto, Portugal.

I went to watch this one without expecting anything in particular from it. I like to go into films like this, quits the preconceptions brought by the excess of knowledge about the people involved. Apparently, i know it now, the directors are part of a new generation in the Hong Kong cinema, and they've produced some hits on that basis. To me they were unknown.

The film is complex, but not always for good reasons. It starts with a very smooth environment, borrowed (i guess, but not necessarily) from the psychological "apartment" thrillers by Polansky. This beginning was thrilling and promising, very good moments. The main character played a writer, i was guessing some kind of game with this characteristic (contemporary good cinema loves to explore these things). But no, what we watch are successive radical cuts between sceneries, story, etc. It moves on to present some fantastic scenery, having something to do with Japanese animé, a kind of Miyazaki filmed with live sets instead of animated ones.

But it fails deeply in trying to produce intense drama environment, in order to pass the environmental global message; instead we get a non pretended comedic portion of film (at a certain time laughs were the most heard sounds in the room).

The thing is, to my view, it gathers too many ways of doing it, to many cinematic theories, in a trick of associating the proliferation of materials and waste with the proliferation of cinematic "moods" and so cause the breathless sensation in the line of the intended message. I guess some contention and simplicity would apply perfectly in this case.

Story is completely irrelevant (not necessarily bad), but it is tiring and without motivation trying to follow it or understand it. Nevertheless this is a film with good production values, not always completely believable, but overall solid.

Some imagery is impressive, and well worked out in the relation with the soundtrack (also not bad), but i don't consider it enough to justify the time it lasts. Unless you ave a very special interest for this kind of movie, i don't recommend it.

My evaluation: 2/5

Tsui Ting-Yin is a best-selling author and for her new book she decides to change genre and instead of writing love stories focus on the supernatural.When writing a chapter for her new book,entitled Re-Cycle,the supernatural she writes about appears to her in real life in the form of a woman.Afraid at first,Tsui Ting-Yin later follows the long-haired woman that appeared to her in order to be able to write more and is soon plunged into a world of fantasy and horror."Re-Cycle" plays more like a fantasy flick than horror.The film certainly looks truly beautiful and features some jaw-dropping scenery,unfortunately it lacks scares and is simply dull at times.Unlike their previous films,the building of nail-biting tension and creepy suspense did not play as big a part in "Re-Cycle".Overall,I expected more from the makers of "The Eye" and "Ab-normal Beauty".A solid 6 out of 10.

All writers ruthlessly re-cycle ideas, characters, memories and experiences. The creative mind is littered with discarded snippets of people and places all waiting to be remembered and put to use. In Re-cycle, Ting-Yin is a successful writer who turned a failed romance into three bestsellers. She is now working on a supernatural novel and strange things are happening in her house. Is this her inspiration, or is her story coming to life? The film's beginning is classically horror, but when Ting-Yin stumbles out of reality it becomes much more fantastic and really feels like a video game. She moves from one bizarre landscape to another, dealing with zombies as she goes.

Beautifully shot, the production is slick, but the story is more melodramatic than frightening.

The Pang Brothers book marked a creatively grim, if disconnected little supernatural horror film balancing that of a novelist (a perfectly pitched performance by Angelica Lee) trying to write a horror novel, but finding out what she writes is personally happening to her. Being haunted by her work with the growing expectations, or a former if complicated love coming back on the scene. She enters a dream reality (where the title comes in to play), mixing the stark horror and fleeting happiness in what is a journey of discovery… up until its undermining ending. I was actually liking the (traditional, but stimulating) build-up (consisting of eerie sounds, lurking figures and a sense of danger) until she enters this fantasy world (like a nightmarish spin of 'Alice's in Wonderland'), where the story felt more like clips (well that's how memories kept hidden, waiting to be remembered simply come and then go) and being cluttered with crazy CGI… which wasn't badly projected, as some sequences were amazing, but eventually I grew tired of the routine. The Pang Brothers' surefooted handling is slick, letting the flowing cinematography craft out haunting frames and wonderfully strange imagery. Inspired, but emotionally starved and the story really loses momentum.

This movie has a writer who has some trouble in her life at the particular moment the movie starts. An old love has resurfaced and she is having difficulty with her next novel. She is seemingly being haunted by a figure she wrote about, but then tossed away then she is somehow pulled into another realm. The movie does start off a bit slowly as there is a bit of set up with a few scares here and there like the typical Asian horror movie. Then when she gets to the other realm the movie is suddenly totally cool as it is so like watching a Silent Hill movie instead. I mean these strange ghosts start chasing our heroine and they move just like the ghosts in Silent Hill 4, she encounters a cliff like in any of the Silent Hill games and she enters an area that looks like the industrialized zone in part 4. Then she runs into an old man and the movie slams on the breaks and you get a few more great visual scenes, but the movie never has the energy it did when the heroine first enters this strange realm. There are still a couple of good visuals such as the mysterious creepy hanging people and the bridge and well. However, there are a few to many scenes that seem to need a push as it takes a while for them to get going and there are a lot of talking scenes and the final confrontation is very anti climatic. Then the ending comes and they throw a twist on top of the rather predictable twist and movie over. All I could think is what could have been if we had more scenes like that where she first arrived rather than say the scene with the flowers and neglected dead people which had no energy and rather light music. This movie also seems to want to be original, but it does not even come close. Other than Silent Hill there is also bits of The Neverending Story, Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away, and a host of other movies. I guess the makers of this film wanted to recycle a lot of other ideas where they might have been better off using just one or two.