Re-Cycle

aka: Gwai Wik

Lee Sinje (aka Angelica Lee), from "The Eye" and "20 30 40," plays young Chinese authoress Ting-yin, who's hit the bestseller lists with a romantic novel under the pen name Xu Jun. She now feels pressure because her next novel, "Re-cycle," has already been announced, and she's suffering from a bad case of creative block. Holed up in her apartment, she starts suffering from visions and weird phone calls. As her sense of reality fragments, she journeys into the world of her unfinished manuscript -- a city of discarded trash, ugly zombies and ghosts in limbo, where she hooks up with a mysterious young girl she names Ting-yu (Zeng Qiqi) and an old man (Lau Siu-ming). Thereon, pic is one long chase movie, with Ting-yin trying to get back to the real word via the Transit as she's pursued by lonely dead souls and recurrent cycles in which everything is, uh, re-cycled. En route, she's forced to confront an episode in her past.

That's it for plot, which is basically a series of set pieces in computer-generated locations where Ting-yin is scared out of her wits. There's a street of old-style Hong Kong tenement buildings, an impressive Escher-like conglomeration of staircases, a red-saturated journey through a womb-like receptacle of aborted fetuses, and a vast plain of tombs and their inhabitants. Visual design and effects, largely in cold, drained colors, are all top-notch.

Ting-yin's (starring LEE Sinje) debut novel has become the bestseller in South East Asia. Her novel is a love story that touches the hearts of all her readers. Ting-yin wrote with her pen-name of Chu Xun. News of her next project,"The Recycle", a novel that evolves around supernatural forces are announced to her readers during her autograph party by her manager, Lawrence (starring Lawrence CHOW). Her readers eagerly await the release of her new book with high expectations of her fictional work to be true to life¡­

Ting-yin starts to work on the Recycle. After drafting a chapter, she stops. She deletes the file which contains the draft from her computer¡­ Later, she begins to see things, including a woman who appears repeatedly at certain places. Some of the phenomenon cannot be explained. Ting-yin feels that the supernatural events depicted in her fictional work begin to unfold in the real world! The most horrible thing is the mysterious woman who comes and goes is actually the heroine of her new book who has come out of the fictional world into the real world. Ting-yin finds it increasingly hard to tell what is real and what is imaginary...

But she soon learns that perhaps she should follow the mysterious woman into the other world. Isn't it exactly the subject matter that she's working on in the Recycle? By having the experience herself, wouldn't it be the best way to learn of the inexplicable? One night, Ting-yin decides to follow the woman into the other world¡­ in which she has the experience of real and pure horror!