The Lingering
Director– Ho Pong Mak, Derrick Tao
Starring – Louis Cheung, Athena Chu
Country of Origin -Hong Kong/China
Distributor - Well Go USA
Number of Discs - 1
Reviewed by - Tyler Miller
Date- 01/01/2020
On New Year’s Eve, a strange spirit starts to terrorize a your mother and her son Dawa. The ghost unleashes his fury on the two until they hide out in the basement of their home. The following morning it seems like the malevolent spirit has finally left. Many years later, Dawa is now a grown man with a taste for greed. He has married a rich woman and has moved to the big and bright city to open a chain of successful restaurants that specialize in exotic foods.
Dawa’s past life soon comes back to haunt him when he discovers that his mother has passed away. At first, this seems like an answer to his recent debits. He could sale his old family home and make another profit to be in the clear and start a savings account. But when he and his new bride visit his village hometown things start to get spooky with the lingering anger of a ghost.
The Lingering (2018) is the directorial debut of Ho Pong Mak and Derrick Tao. This is a shiny and polished first effort. It feels like a nice blend of the recent American ghost films and J Horror with some local Hong Kong flavor. But the film starts to fall apart in its ham-fisted screenplay. The resulting film is pretty to look at (minus some seriously misused and cheap CGI), but the story is enough to give you whiplash with its sudden shifts in tone.
The movie begins with a nicely paced haunting with the rising fear of the mother. The directors and cinematographers Leung Ming-Kai and Cheng Siu-Keung establish a good floorplan of the house and all the areas the ghost could be possessing or hiding in. Other than one hilariously dumb moment when an elder of the town abandons a kid, just to say that said kid is in danger and should not be left alone, the tension is well kept for the first 30 minutes before making a time jump to the present day.
The time jump is when the whole story falls apart and becomes a bit of a writing trainwreck. The adult Dawa (Louis Cheung) is a one-note character who is so clueless to the haunting that the rest of the film becomes comical. The screenplay then decides to turn the story into a fable about the tensions between generations and end the story with mother and son finally seeing eye to eye. This is where the film completely drops the ghost elements to focus on flashback after flashback of uninteresting son being jerk scenes.
It’s a shame the script is such a mess. The Lingering does carry some mood and almost works as a horror movie. There is plenty of inventive, and borderline campy, horror set pieces including a woman being menaced in a bathtub and Dawa choking on food. But the finished film is bit of a dud. It’s still entertaining as long as you don’t be afraid to turn your brain off for fuller enjoyment.
Well Go USA gives The Lingering a handsome looking release on Blu-ray. The 1080p HD transfer is spot-free with no digital noise or focus issues. The darker colors are also not as muted as the trailer. The disc itself comes with two audio options. The first is the Cantonese DTS-HDMA audio. This track is clear with no hiss or pops. The second choice is the Cantonese Stereo mix which is a little softer on my home sound system. Extras are limited to trailers for other Well Go USA releases and a brief making-of featurette.
The Lingering is a narrative mess. But if you’re in the mood for some Chinese horror thrills its not the worst film available.
