Yee dou hung gaan

Jim is a psychiatrist that convinces people that ghosts are just in their mind and doesn't truly exist. Yan is a girl with a troubled past that haunts her. She sees ghosts in her new Apartment, but Jim convinces her that these are all in her imagination. The psychiatric part of the film never gets dull and repetitive, and some if it is actually quite convincing. Jim talking to himself about his patients and this and that of psychology is one of the most interesting parts in the film. It never gets forced or unnecessary.

The horror parts of the film are usually just jump scares and most of it has to do with music, but it's still effective. The first part that made me jump was when the title appeared. So, it's pretty much expected to be jumping up and down throughout the whole film. The plot isn't original. But then it doesn't have to. It's simply about people thinking that they're seeing ghosts. It's not entirely a horror film. The scares come in quite surprisingly, and all of them are just the imagination of the characters. Nothing really memorable, but still effective.

I liked how the film tried to stay away from the clichés that most Asian horror have: A girl in a dress slowly walking with her long hair covering her face. I'm quite convinced that they made the long dead girlfriend of Jim's hair to be very short so that they wouldn't end up with that effect (which is pretty much unavoidable, long hair or not).

The characters are played excellently by the actors. Leslie Cheung (his last film, to which after making this movie, is said to have completely changed and got severely depressed. Jumped off a building and died soon in the hospital) is fantastic as Jim, the psychiatrist with the troubled past. Karena Lam and other supporting roles give out excellent performances as well.

Although the film has great performances and a pretty good story to tell, it's the ending where it fell apart. The movie suddenly becomes a lovestory with lots of cheese. It truly felt very, very different, and was quite unnecessary to end it that way. Yes, Jim overcoming and accepting, instead of forgetting, his past was how he was able to be cured. I loved the part when the character's roles are switched after Yan has recovered. After facing her parents, Jim is now the one that needs help. But the ending was simply a disappointment.

But the film does give out some great messages. Ghosts aren't what horror films, T.V. shows or books would have us believe to be. It's our troubled past that haunts us. And letting go of this past and not remembering it isn't the only thing you can do. You can simply accept it and choose to live a normal life. This is the conflict that almost all the characters are facing. We find out that the landlord, in what could possibly be the creepiest part of the film, actually prepares his long dead wife and kid's slippers in the doorway and cooks extra food for them.

7.5

`Inner Senses' is another great horror movie to come out of Asia in recent years. However, it suffers from a certain lack of originality. Its basic premise imitates that of `The Sixth Sense' i.e. psychiatrist tries to help troubled person who sees dead people. The horror scenes in the last minutes of `Inner Senses' also borrows heavily from Japan's `Ring'. Such weaknesses aside, `Inner Sense' is certainly an intelligent horror movie, much more so than my other Asian favourite to come out in 2002, `The Eye'. While `The Eye' goes all out to scare audiences, `Inner Senses' prefers to make audiences think beyond what they are witnessing on the screen. In what is probably his last great performance, Leslie Cheung is Jim, a psychiatrist who works in a mental hospital. Jim is an atheist who places his faith in science and has no time for superstitious nonsense, including religion. As he states in his lecture at the beginning of the movie, `ghosts' are all in the mind, the result of the mind putting together various randomly accumulated information about a society's superstitions. He agrees to take on a client as a favour for a colleague. Karena Lam is Yan, a troubled girl who claims to see dead people. She lives in terror of the strange visitors who visits her apartment, especially her kindly (but somewhat mentally unbalanced) landlord's long dead wife and child. She plasters all her glass windows and mirrors in her apartment with newspapers to avoid seeing `things'. Jim works hard to free Yan of her fears and successfully convinces her that none of her visions are real. They are the result of her loneliness, troubled childhood, failed relationships, overactive imagination and neighbours' pranks. But once Yan is freed of her visions, Jim starts to see a dead teenage girl himself . she hums a strangely familiar tune, giggles at some secret joke, and follows him around. He has flashbacks about his teenage years and sleepwalks looking for something from the past . something so terrible that he has buried the memories in unreachable places in his mind. Yan has to help him figure out what it is before his visions destroy him. `Inner Senses' will have audiences thinking long after the end of the movie. Although `ghosts' do make multiple spine-tingling appearances in `Inner Senses', we are not told unequivocally that they are, in fact, ghosts. The protagonists' experiences can rightly be attributed to their fractured mental conditions. Leslie Cheung and Karena Lam both give outstanding performances as flawed people coping with inexplicable and terrifying events. The last minutes of `Inner Senses' eerily foreshadow Leslie Cheung's suicide in 2003. The Chinese movie world has lost a great entertainer, but his memory will remain with us.

The film 'Inner Senses' is almost two movies. The first chapter is about a young female college student, Yan, who sees ghosts. Yan moves into a small apartment alone, and begins to have strange hallucinations, so she sees a doctor, Jim, On the behest of her cousin. Through her vulnerability she starts to fall for her doctor, who is also her professor, but they are able to keep a professional relationship, and she actually gets cured through the reconciliation between her and her estranged parents that Jim orchestrates.

The next chapter soon begins though, with Jim and Yan living together, and all is well, until he begins sleepwalking, or rather renews a pattern he lived years ago. He though is in deep denial, and will not believe it is his problem, even when he watches a tape of his nightly activities.

We soon find he is haunted by his own ghosts. The love he outgrew and cast aside in high school, who took her life in a terrible way, never resolved, now demands a forum in the hall of the heart. Will he survive the meeting?

The film is very touching, with intermittent spooks, well placed, without being overdone, with obvious ideas taken from Hideo Nakata, an overall very enjoyable, and moving film about love, loss, self discovery, and the battle of the mind and heart to move on. Slightly sappy at times, the story and acting are good enough to overlook the flaws.

Overall Score 7/10

This one starts with the old, clichéd premise of horror movies - tormented girl can see scary ghosts. You'd expect the regular, mediocre servings of Asian horror taking place after that. Not in "Inner Senses".

Her psychiatrist, played by Leslie Cheung, doesn't believe in ghosts but is eager to help. Only problem is that he apparently has some psychological issues as well.

To say more than that would be a crime. Suffice it to say that this is a wonderfully crafted movie, that is almost Lynch-ian in its unweaving. Are the ghosts real or just in our minds? Watch and decide.

This movie deserves a second viewing and a lot more praise than it got. I would classify it as a psychological horror, but labels don't do this film justice. Don't expect much gore (thankfully) but there's tension and jumps in all the right places.

This gets extra creepy points because Leslie Cheung actually killed himself a year later. In a way, this movie it is incredibly fitting as his last work - a great one.

This is an above average Asian horror that challenges you to think.

7/10.

Good horror film with a serious plot about people who cannot recover from the losses in their pasts. The film builds up very slowly to build character but also produces some genuinely creepy scenes in the third act. The subplot about the landlord (which also acts as a catalyst for the main character) is a little under-explored, which is a shame, but other than that it's a very accomplished film. More Dark Water than, say, Ju-on: The Grudge.

Also Leslie Chungs last film before he threw himself out of a window...a little spooky considering some of the scenes in this film, which are similar.