It will be interesting to revisit this, as I remember being a little underwhelmed by its slightly more conservatively tinged message towards fate, heavy handed morality and the lack of an individual's ability to influence pre-destined events at the time (although I also remember finding the major setpiece finale quite effective too!), and I think it may be because of the different sensibilities of a Hong Kong-Thai made film as compared to the "J-horror" films that I was more familiar with. This was the problem with Tartan Video at the time doing their "Tartan Asia Extreme" strand, because it ended up lumping in all sorts of films from different areas of Asia together when there could be quite striking cultural differences in the way that each territory explored the horror genre in particular (and that aspect was only made more opaque when the US remake wave of the big films - The Ring, The Eye, Pulse, etc - put that specific context of each of their sources at one remove even further as well. The Grudge remake being a quite notable exception to the rule there! Let alone when we factor in that fascinating case of Gothika, which was a French director trying to do something in the vein of "J-horror"!). But I do agree on the lead performance being extremely strong, and this feels like a very early example of seemingly a Sixth Sense-influenced approach to a ghost film, with a character trying to help spirits in order to come to terms with her newly received 'gift', but having issues with knowing if she is doing the right thing at all, whether it would have been better to have done nothing...
... or in an ironic Ring-style twist that there was literally no tangible impact that she could have made at all in any fashion and that the 'gift' was never about being given the opportunity to change things, but just an inescapable curse of now always being aware of upcoming tragedies well ahead of time.
Hopefully this may bode well for future releases of the other films in the trilogy - The Eye 2 and The Eye... Infinity. Although regarding the Pang Brothers, I do think the emphasis on moral comeuppance aspect works much better in their crime films Bangkok Dangerous and particuarly One Take Only (aka Som and Bank: Bangkok for Sale). Back in the 2000s Tartan Video also released the specifically Thai-made horror anthology
Bangkok Haunted on DVD, which Arrow may want to revisit some time too, especially having tackled the contemporaneous anthology films from other countries, Three and Three.. Extremes, last year.
And the
real coup for Arrow would be if they could release Oxide Pang's 2003 adaptation of the Alex Garland novel
The Tesseract some time, which has never been released in the UK before, and only on DVD through a long OOP disc put out by Sundance/Showtime in the US. I loved the Alex Garland novel and think the film of The Tesseract unfortunately suffers in comparison, mostly because Garland's novel is doing a cross-cutting ensemble drama story in the style of something like Traffic or Amores Perros (or Babel), but unfortunately the film is rather too streamlined into more surface level characterisations.
But that is still a really interesting piece to watch because it clarifies that Garland's novel is primarily from an 'outside-in' perspective about outside forces of mercenary foreigners interacting with (and deforming) the Phillippines by their presence (à laThe Beach!). Which is why being an ensemble-told story is so important once we get to the low level Filipino gang member figure for giving that otherwise ignored entirely alternative 'inside-out' perspective. Although the most important aspect of the Garland novel is that
none of the characters feel like the 'main character' of the story, so the reader has multiple entry and exit points to contemplate the narrative action from. That is a really delicate and complicated tone to have to achieve and unfortunately the film never really feels as if it properly captured that sense, which may be why it does not feel as if it is working with a centrally coherent thesis underpinning its action in the same way as the novel was. But it certainly would be a film worth revisiting agin some time!
