Three

Put together as a three-way Asian co-production by Applause Pictures in Hong Kong, Three is a ghost-story omnibus. All three episodes contain startling and occasionally scary images, but the overall tone is more elegiac than shocking: this is a seriously beautiful movie. Not surprisingly, each story reflects the supernatural traditions and contemporary fears of the culture it comes from. Kim Ji-Woon’s Memories (Korea) is set in a not-yet-finished dormitory town outside Seoul. Sung-Min’s wife has disappeared and he is suffering strange memory lapses; meanwhile his wife wakes in an unfamiliar landscape and tries to find her way home. In Nonzee Nimibutr’s The Wheel (Thailand), the leader of a khon temple dance troupe reaches for greater prestige and prosperity by founding a hun lakorn lek puppet troupe–but underestimates the proprietorial curses which traditionally cling to puppets. And in Peter Chan’s Coming Home (Hong Kong) a single-parent cop (Eric Tsang) searches for his missing son and stumbles upon a bizarre secret involving his neighbour (Leon Lai) and an extremist use of Chinese herbal medicine.- Tony Rayns