The Fatality

A genre film as a horror film should be. There is a pleasantly complex story that can only be followed if you accept that traffic is possible between the world of the living and the world of the dead. And that there are ghosts. Good and bad.
The film is a co-production between Taiwan and Thailand and as a result it combines two visions of life after death, or better: life during death.
The protagonist is Ho Shi-rong, a young Taiwanese man who tries to commit suicide with pills. When he recovers, he finds himself lying in a hospital in Thailand and they think he is a Thai man. Arsenni is his new name and when he has recovered from the shock, he investigates his new identity. The original Arsenni had a special position at city hall. He stamped the death certificates and as a result really did rule over life and death. Ho Shi-rong is obliged to take over this role.
Here the film effectively mixes the claustrophobia of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with the stoical Thai attitude to death and the sensation of Chinese ghost stories. Of course – it remains a genre film – there is a way out for Ho Shi-rong from his impossible position. He is someone else in a world that is no longer that of the living.
A wealth of Chinese genre ghosts, told with the suppleness of Thai commercial film making. The best of both worlds. (GjZ)

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