Yee dou hung gaan

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

`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.

INNER SENSES continues Hong Kong's trend of making movies where attractive young women see ghosts. Like Hollywood, Hong Kong has never met a successful film yet that it didn't want to copy...and copy...and copy...and copy some more...

The gimmick for INNER SENSES is that it takes a more psychological approach to its supernatural elements. The ghosts may be real or not, it's open to debate right up to the very end. Unlike other Hong Kong films cashing in on the "I see dead people" trend, INNER SENSES does try to approach the subject from a somewhat common sensical direction, even if the ending comes across as awfully camp.

Of note is that INNER SENSES is one of Leslie Cheung's last films before his untimely suicide earlier this eyar. It's a shame, because the world is going to miss his talent.

6 out of 10.

"Inner Senses" tells the story of Yan,a young woman seemingly haunted by fleeting images of dead people.Her psychiatrist Jim Law recognizes the source of the girl's problems and eventually helps her to regain equilibrium.With Yan now no longer his patient,the two become close to each other,but Jim's own well-being soon starts to disintegrate and he experiences the sort of inexplicable visions that previously drove Yan to attempt suicide."Inner Senses" is a well-acted and surprisingly creepy horror film that relies more on atmosphere than cheap shocks.Unfortunately Leslie Cheung who played Jim committed suicide a few months after the movie's release.The film,whilst nowhere nearly as creepy as "The Eye" or "Shutter" offers some decent scares.Check it out.8 out of 10.

I've just completed watching all of Cheung's films now, phew....

Yes, it's true that there are many echoes of this film already out there, but I guess it's hard to be unique when producing a ghost story these days!

I thought the film had a reasonably plausable plotline. But most of all, I thought the main actors gave a thoroughly good performance. It's not always easy to discuss the topic of mental disorder in Asian societies, and you also felt that the two main protagonists were quite isolated from everyday events around them. Everything that goes on revolves around them and they have a powerful story to tell.

Cheung is looking more mature than in most of his other roles. He is not a happy-go-lucky comic playboy any more. In fact there is no humour in this film at all, and the tone just gets darker and darker as it progresses. It's a little sad to see how the fate of Cheung's character came to perhaps resemble the final moments in Cheung's real life. I would have loved to see Cheung continue playing in film roles for ever and ever.

A proud career end for Leslie Cheung.