INNER SENSES (2002)
Directed by: Lo Chi-leung
Starring: Karena Lam, Leslie Cheung, Waise Lee, Valerie Chow, Norman Tsui
What is scary? Is it a big dope in a hockey mask lumbering around with a hunting knife? Is it a wisecracking, razor-fingered midget in an ugly hat who isn't even real? Or is it a footstep outside your bedroom door as you're falling asleep all alone? Or a long black hair found on your pillow in the morning, when you know you slept by yourself? Is it the loud, hollow "Boo!" or the soft, indecipherable whispering from the closet? What scares us is being alone, what scares us is going crazy, what scares us is the thought that maybe we did something a long time ago that we still haven't paid for, what scares us is not being able to tell the difference between being asleep and waking up. At the end of the long, long day we go home alone, and we all are terrified of the most haunted house of all: our minds.
INNER SENSES takes the idea of THE SIXTH SENSE and stands it on its head. Karena Lam is a young woman who can see dead people, and it basically sucks. Instead of embracing her abilities in a big Kumbaya climax, she's become a shut-in. Depressed, swaddled in layers of sweaters, her lank hair hiding her face, she stays away from people and tries to stare straight ahead because on the edges of her vision They are always trying to creep in. They are always trying to drive her crazy. They won't leave her alone, howling in pain and loneliness, trying to make her talk about Them, trying to make her kill herself, trying to make her as dead as They are.
Leslie Cheung is her psychiatrist, a busy guy who breaks his back under a staggering caseload in order to prove to himself that he's successful and important. Efficient, supercilious, priding himself on his arrogant rationality he thinks he's a Normal, Hard-Working, Good Guy. But when he's all alone, his loneliness seeps out into his apartment and poisons him as slowly and surely as toxic waste. In the melancholy, Hong Kong ghost classic, ROUGE, Leslie played the survivor of a double suicide, crippled by cowardice and desperate to forget, until a phantasmal Anita Mui showed up to haunt him. But there's no ghost to haunt him in INNER SENSES, only his own cowering conscience, his own self-loathing, and guilt.
Karena Lam and Leslie Cheung come together and start teasing out the threads of her problem. He's convinced she's hallucinating, and she just wants to kill herself and be done with it, whether she's tormented by hallucinations or by ghosts. New apartments, paranoid neighbors, the suffocating weight of urban loneliness and disappointed lives all add up to a world where being alone and being dead are the same thing. Like Henry James' ghost stories, INNER SENSES unfolds subtly and with a dreadful illogic, echoing down the dark, empty corridors of the houses inside our hearts. The shuffle of light footsteps heard from afar, the failing late afternoon light, the lengthening shadows, the rustle of clothes in an empty room, the eyes watching you from your closet, the thick voice mumbling your name from underneath the bed — this is what's scary and this is the kind of fear that INNER SENSES is built upon, the kind that traces an icy path up and down your sweating spine. In INNER SENSES, every last lonely one of us is a ghost, and we haunt ourselves.