Bunshinsaba 3

笔仙3

China, 2014, colour, 2.35:1, 101 mins.

Director: An Byeong-gi 안병기 | 安兵基.

Rating: 5/10.

A disorganised script makes this the weakest of the franchise to date.

STORY

A clinic near Shanghai, the present day. Xu Li’na (Jiang Yiyan) is told she is ready to be discharged from the clinic where she has been for five years to a more comfortable sanatorium, but must not get over-stressed because of her weak heart. Xu Li’na says she only wants to see her five-year-old daughter, Xiao’ai, again. To be discharged, however, she still needs the consent of her family – her grandfather Xu Dongzhe (Ya Keqin), who’s a professor, and his wife (Yang Guang) – who have not yet agreed. Xu Li’na accuses the clinic of conspiring with them to keep her there, and runs off, taking a train to Shanghai. Her grandmother tells her she has no daughter, is mentally ill and should return to the clinic; but Xu Li’na then sees her grandparents bundling a young girl (Zhao Zixuan) into a car and driving off. The car is hit by a lorry and the grandparents are killed; the girl survives in hospital, where Xu Li’na tells her she is her mother. They go to live quietly together in the Xu family mansion, in the countryside northwest of Shanghai, but Xu Li’na starts suffering from delusions, hearing Xiao’ai’s voice counting at night and the sound of a piano, and seeing what seems like a ghost. Disturbed by the painting of a young, scarred girl that hangs on the stairs, she borrows a claw hammer from a couple in a neighbouring house – painter/art teacher Xu Kuizhe (Xu Ang) and his wife – and takes it down and destroys it. When Xu Li’na receives a strange call one night from the wife, scolding her for getting rid of the picture, she goes round to the neighbouring house again, only to see the wife being strangled by a hooded man. The man chases Xu Li’na, who passes out from her weak heart. She’s rescued by Jiao Yuanyuan (Jiao Junyan), an art student at a local college, who earlier applied for the job of home teaching Xiao’ai but was turned down by Xu Li’na. The next day the police find nothing in the neighbouring house and say it’s been empty for years. As Xiao’ai likes Jiao Yuanyuan, Xu Li’na hires the young woman as a babysitter. Jiao Yuanyuan, meanwhile, seduces a fellow student, Zijian (Dong Zijian), who likes her and promises to do anything she wants. After Xu Li’na suffers more visions and is convinced the house is haunted, Jiao Yuanyuan offers to summon the house’s evil spirit by using bixian 笔仙, an ouija board-like game using a pen.

REVIEW

After regaining some of his old mojo with Bunshinsaba II 笔仙II (2013), South Korean director An Byeong-gi 안병기 | 安兵基 slips back several notches with the third in his China-made horror franchise. Bunshinsaba 3 笔仙3 is as smoothly packaged as the others, and again has the look of a Korean movie that just happens to have Chinese in it: though An has relocated his career to the Mainland, he still employs many South Koreans among the key crew. However, the film suffers from a disorganised script that doesn’t provide any original scares and relies on a Big Twist to sort out the incomprehensible plot when the film is almost over. It’s too much, too late, and the movie hardly makes sense even then.

There’s also a feeling throughout that, following the relative success of Bunshisaba II, An is taking his audience for granted this time. The Mainland market, however, is a demanding one nowadays – not least in the arena of modestly budgeted horrors – and the public voted with its feet, making this the weakest grosser of the series (RMB61 million, RMB82 million, RMB50 million). If Bunshinsaba is to continue as an annual July attraction, it will have to pull its socks up fast.

Like the other films, and including An’s original South Korean one (Bunshinsaba: Ouija Board 분신사바, 2004), the plot has a fresh set of characters and is unconnected, apart from having a young female spirit who happens again to be called Xiao’ai 小艾 and featuring the use of the ouija board-like game called “bunshinsaba” (an invented word, like “abracadabra”, and translated by the Chinese term bĭxiān 笔仙, roughly meaning “pen fairy”). After an intriguing start – in which a woman, Xu Li’na, who may or may not be totally mad, exits a clinic and is reunited with her daughter Xiao’ai – the movie settles down, like the first in the franchise, into a haunted-mansion horror, with Xu Li’na, who’s also on medication for a weak heart, meeting a raft of weird characters and nocturnal shocks.

The shocks, alas, are routine and recall familiar horror tropes (a haunted painting, a child on a kiddie bike, twisting necks, a ghostly voice and piano, etc.). Regular Korean composer Jeong Yong-jin 정용진 | 丁庸镇 and editor Ham Seong-weon 함성원 | 咸盛元 keep the atmosphere stoked in a professional way, along with clean, immaculate visuals by fellow Korean Yun Myeong-shik 윤명식 | 尹明植 (Bunshinsaba II); but the screenplay, by newcomer Yi Sun-an 이순안 | 李順安, generates little tension and is jerkily structured, especially with regard to a female art student who later takes on a major role. With most characters appearing to be either schizophrenic or Doppelgangers, the plot ties itself up in Gordian knots that are only partly severed near the end by the Big Twist.

An ramps up the action in the final half-hour, but by then the viewer has been fed so little information that some sequences (such as a sudden pregnancy by one character) are borderline ridiculous, and certainly ineffectual in horror terms. Playing younger than her age, 27-year-old actress Jiao Junyan 焦俊艳 (Baby Don’t Cry 宝贝别哭, 2012) does her best with the confusing role of a strange art student, and child actress Zhao Zixuan 赵紫萱 is effective as the young daughter. But it’s Jiang Yiyan 江一燕, in her first horror movie as the bipolar Xu Li’na, who has to carry the film. So good as the woman stranded in Berlin in I Phone You 爱封了 (2011), opposite Huang Bo in rom-com The Pretending Lovers 假装情侣 (2011), and as a female constable in The Four II 四大名捕II (2013), Jiang is mostly called upon just to look baffled and scared. But in the opening and closing scenes her classy playing hints at the psycho-horror that Bunshinsaba 3 could have been with a better screenplay.>

The title Bunshinsaba III is used on publicity material but Bunshinsaba 3 on the film itself.

CREDITS

Presented by China Film (CN), Beijing Yoshow Film & TV (CN).

Script: Yi Sun-an, Yang Zhe. Photography: Yun Myeong-shik. Editing: Ham Seong-weon, Yi Gweon-hyeon. Music: Jeong Yong-jin. Art direction: Zhang Yu. Sound: Wang Yanwei, Wang Dong. Action: Kang Hao. Special effects: Tu Yi’nan. Visual effects: Gim Byeong-rae (Moneff). Executive director: Yi Sun-an.

Cast: Jiang Yiyan (Xu Li’na), Jiao Junyan (Jiao Yuanyuan), Wang Longhua (hospital doctor), Dong Zijian (Zijian), Bonnie Zhao (Li Wenwen/Xiao’ai), Rong Yi (Xiao’ai), Xu Ang (Xu Kuizhe, art teacher), Zhang Wei (Zijian’s mother), Yang Mengxiao (kindergarten head), Yao Keqin (Xu Dongzhe, professor), Yang Guang (grandmother), Wang Yan (female college student), Chen Shuyang (Jiang Xing, child in train), Liu Shuchen (Jiang Xing’s mother), He Feng (Zheng Shanhua), Zhong Rui (retarded boy), Gu Dian (police inspector), Wan Shengli (hospital head).

Release: China, 4 Jul 2014.

(Review originally publisherd on Film Business Asia, 6 Aug 2014.)