A young, handsome Hong Konger has a one-night stand with a beautiful woman with a bizarre secret: she sees ghosts and other strange apparitions. More and more, their two lives become intertwined, pulling him into some strange supernatural mystery.
Ann Hui is a beloved HK director that I've been meaning to check out more. Her recent A Simple Life is an incredible film, and her earlier film Boat People is haunting and powerful. Visible Secret is the least serious and most lightweight of her films I have seen so far, but it is strange and interesting and displays her usual technical cinematic elegance. And it shows that she is a lot more varied than I realized.
Visible Secret isn't a straight forward horror film, more some weird hybrid supernatural comedy/drama/romance that uses the visual language of horror movies while only occasionally having scenes that feel like something out of a more traditional horror movie. The tone of the film is a little perplexing (and it runs out of a little steam by the end), but it's all so deftly handled by Hui that I was willing to go along with the ride even though I didn't always understand the directions.
Rating: B
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