Missing (2008)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

the audience applauded

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

In Hong Kong, Dr. Gao Jing (Lee Sinje) is introduced to the brother of her best girlfriend Chen Xiao Kai (Isabella Leong), the photographer and diver Dave Chen Guo Dong (Guo Xiao Dong). They fall in love for each other and Guo Dong invites Gao Jing to travel to Taiwan to visit an ancient submarine city, where he intends to propose her. During the dive, Guo Dong vanishes and his headless body is found later while Gao Jing cannot recall what happened underwater. She decides to investigate and a bleak mystery is disclosed."Sam Hoi Tsam Yan" is a messy, boring and melodramatic never-ending ghost story. The screenplay is awful, with many ridiculous twists where nothing is what seems to be. This movie is so terrible that gives the sensation that will never end. The only good point is the wonderful cinematography. The absurd plot in IMDb is totally wrong. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): "Mergulho Fatal" ("Fatal Dive")

Woman is left to pick up the pieces after her photographer boyfriend goes missing and is discovered dead on a working vacation that was to be the time he proposed to her.There are questions as to whether the body is his and she begins to try and unravel what had happened to her boyfriend.Strange and pretty much a mess of a film bounces through time and space as the woman begins to have visions and relive past events. I think. Frankly I'm not sure what the hell was going on.Certainly the events make for some great looking images, but the plot is not really clear. I kind of lost interest about half way in and just kind of went with it hoping for an "ah ha" moment that would make it all make sense and make me want to back it up and try again. It never happened. I know many people who dislike the film are calling it further proof of the directorial ability of Tsui Hark. I'm not so sure partly because some of the sequences work beautifully, but more because Hark has never been a great director. To be certain he's directed some great, or near great films (Peking Opera Blues, We're going to Eat You, Butterfly Murders), but for the most part he is a better producer than a director (He produced John Woo's Better Tomorrow films and Bullet in the Head, The Chinese Ghost Story films among others). I don't think he's declined as a director. I just think he picked a poor script.

I thought maybe the IMDb score of "5" was a mistake. And I was correct. "5" is much too generous a score for such an absolute waste of my time. The plot focuses on a female psychiatrist whose undersea photographer boyfriend mysteriously died during a recent dive, and she has to deal with the aftermath of his strange death. There are far too many plot holes, cheap scares, and suspensions of disbelief to allow you to even tolerate the movie. When you're not rolling your eyes or checking your watch, you'll probably be tearing your hair out at the ridiculousness of it all. For example, *SPOILER ALERT* a good third of the movie takes place inside the head of one of the crazy characters, and when the director reveals that it as "it was all just a dream"... well, you realize you're not getting any of that part of your life back. I give it one star for some decently-shot underwater scenes and pretty fish. But then again, I can get that sort of stuff as part of my screen-saver already, so why bother? Please STAY AWAY from this awful, awful excuse for a movie.

ADDITIONAL SPOILER WARNING It's a double irony: it has been suggested in the movie that the protagonist Dr KO Tsing, a psychiatrist, is schizophrenic, something that can be said about the movie itself which cannot quite make up its mind whether to be a love story or a horror thriller. Actually, there shouldn't be a problem for a movie to be both but here the two elements repel each other like oil and water. Another flaw is that there is such a proliferation of borrowed ideas that it compels you to wonder where the originality of director Tsui Hark has gone.The openings scenes are delightfully lucid, an elegant depiction of how a young women CHAN Siu-hoi (Isabella Leung) brings together her photographer brother Kwok-tung and Tsing, both dedicated professionals who have little time for romance but a common interest in diving. As the relationship develops and blossoms, we see the three planning a diving trip to explore a sunken, mysterious ancient kingdom.Abruptly, the next shot brings us to a desolate funeral as we learn that Kwok-tung had died underwater in the adventure while Tsing has had a partial loss of memory of what happened. What ensues, the main body of the movie, is a psychological thriller with an "I see dead people" diversion, and also a distinct "Ghost" (1990) flavour. As the array of mysteries and twists are gradually disentangled, we are finally handed an overriding twist that is not unlike the cop out in movies like "Vanilla sky" (2001). What you've seen in this entire segment is only in Tsing's mind. The accident did happen, but the rest is what she constructs in her mind to try to explain everything.In the third and final segment, we see how Tsing, discharged from the psychiatric hospital and under the care of Siu-hoi, has completely lost her memory. Here, we see a remarkable resemblance to "Floating landscape" (2003) which depicts how a women whose fiancé had died of illness goes to his home town to look for a landscape of white blossoms that he had loved, and in the process discovers more about him. Here, Tsing needs to re-discover Kwok-tung from square one, and the landscape here is "feng loi" ("paradise" in Chinese), in a photograph taken from inside his small hideaway cabin on an idyllic beach, focusing on a small island in the middle of the ocean.The thriller part of the movie is somewhat contrived. The love story should have been better, particularly with the good performance of Angelica Lee, but suffers from lacking a sufficient development before the man dies, as you see in "Ghost". Angelica Lee did as much as anybody could, and the beautiful music (particularly the theme song) helps. In the end, this movie brings flashes of ideas and scenes that remind you of what director Tsui can do, but is on the whole a disappointment.