Director: Danny Pang, Oxide Chun Pang
Year: 2004
Country: Hong Kong/Singapore
Alternate Titles: Gin gwai 2
Genre: Ghosts
Plot:
After a traumatic accident, a pregnant woman wakes up from the hospital and begins feeling uneasy about the world around her, eventually finding out that she’s become able to see ghostly visions and hallucinations following her, forcing her to understand what’s going on.
Review:
Overall, this was a decent enough if somewhat problematic sequel. Among the better elements here is the way this sets up the main storyline about what’s going on, as the main mystery present here is a thoroughly intriguing one. The early stages of this one, focusing on the day-to-life she leads and how she goes about spending the day while waiting for the birth of her baby, only for the accident in the bathtub to start to affect her with the sudden ability to see ghosts and other hallucinations that the people around her are unable to, gives this one a solid start to things. As we’re unsure what caused everything to start or why she’s going through these scenarios, especially as this travels along deeper into her pregnancy, this becomes far more emotionally taxing and makes everything that much more unnerving with the belief that her accusations are nothing more than stress from the situation and that she’s slowly going crazy, all of which helps to provide a genuinely enjoyable experience to get started.
That these ghostly interactions and visions are genuinely terrifying and chilling in concept helps to make everything that much more realistic and believable. The main series of encounters, mostly centered around the brief moments where they show up out of the shadows and hang out around her when she least expects it, serves to generate some rather fun moments here with this kind of eerie atmosphere before giving way to more involved and lengthier setpieces. With her freakout at a natal exercise in a swimming pool or a genuinely chilling experience at a bus station when a series of dead bodies fall out of the sky unexpectedly and begin speaking terrifying epithets at her, there’s a lot of chilling moments featured here that manage to highlight the kind of ghostly encounters here brought about by her condition and the exacerbating situations surrounding her as the ghosts become more immediate as it leads into the emotional finale with her realizing the extent of the hauntings against her. These are enough to like here.
There are a few issues here that hold this one down. The major drawback here is the generally lackluster approach in the middle where very little of what’s going on here is explored. Despite the fun of how the suicide attempts at the beginning all serve to hold back the explanations for everything, as we never know what sparked everything in the first place, this all comes off with a wholly lackluster feeling. At the same time, the lack of cohesive connection to the ghosts themselves that she keeps seeing makes this whole idea a highly convoluted one. Furthermore, a lot of what goes on while trying to deal with the visions she has is handled in the kind of flimsy manner, as the whole experience is to her as if everything is completely missing, making this one feel quite bland while we’re waiting around trying to deal with the different visions. As well as some rather weak effects work for the ghosts, as they’re not all that well-executed, these all manage to bring this one down overall.
Overview: ***/5
A serviceable if problematic enough sequel, there’s enough here to give this some worthwhile factors even though some of the issues here are a bit more detrimental and damaging than the original. Those with an appreciation for this style of genre fare, who are big Asian horror fans in general, or who are fans of the original will have a lot to like here while most others out there should heed caution.
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