Black Mirror

少女灵异日记

China, 2013, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 91 mins.

Director: Xu Bin 许斌.

Rating: 6/10.

Carefully mounted horror is entertaining enough but saddled with a tangled script.

STORY

Tianjin, northern China, 1948. Xu Ningya (Feng Bo), a psychologist who studied medicine at Edinburgh University along with her assistant Gao Jiesen (Wu Linkai) and returned to China in 1946, explains how they became involved in the case of a girl, Xiaolan, who was horrifically murdered in Room 205 of her father’s Tianjin hotel by her married lover Shangguan, a doctor. The story starts as Zheng Xinling (Lu Chen), the daughter of a wealthy family, is recovering at home after crashing a car in the hills, an accident in which her mother (Wang Liqun) died. Xu Ningya, who is in charge of her recovery, tells Zheng Xinling’s father that it’s time to take her back to the scene of the accident to help expunge her feelings of guilt. Xu Ningya and Zheng Xinling go up into the hills to a large hotel in the woods, Heiquan Shanzhuang (Black Spring Manor), that’s run by Cao (Zhou Yemang), with the help of his niece Li’na (Han Yifei). Xu Ningya puts Zheng Xinling in Room 205 and herself in Room 206. Zheng Xinling still suffers from nightmares, and while bathing in a hot spring sees the characters xiao 晓 and lan 澜 carved on the wall. In the woods outside she falls into a hole and is rescued by a handsome young man who introduces himself as Gao Jiesen, just arrived at the hotel. Zheng Xinling has started to read a diary she found in a drawer that was written by Xiaolan, describing how, at the age of seven she was adopted from a Nanjing orphanage and taken to the hotel in the hills above Tianjin. Xu Ningya encourages Zheng Xinling to read the diary, in order to enter into Xiaolan’s world. As Gao Jiesen starts courting her, Zheng Xinling reads in Xiaolan’s diary how, when she was 17, a doctor called Shangguan (Piao Junming) arrived at the hotel to treat an outbreak of sickness and the two fell for each other.

REVIEW

An atmospherically shot horror, largely set in a spooky hotel in the woods outside Tianjin in the late 1940s, Black Mirror 少女灵异日记 is an interesting second feature by Mainland film-maker Xu Bin 许斌, who began as a d.p. on films like Far from Home 我的美丽乡愁 (2003), Aspirin 阿司匹林 (2006) and Visitors from the Sui Dynasty 隋朝来客 (2010) before switching to direction. It’s a big step forward after his debut with the much more standard horror The Frightening Night 夜惊魂 (2011, see poster, left), centred on an actress harrassed by a mysterious caller, and though the central mystery is weakened by the script giving much of the game away in a prologue and subsequent voice-overs it makes up for this with a totally crazed climax and a final twist.

Based on a story by mystery writer Yang Pan 杨叛, the tangled screenplay was lead written by Wu Nan 吴楠, who worked on Curse of the Golden Flower 满城尽带黄金甲 (2006) as well as two fine modern dramas by Wang Jing 王竞, The End of Year 一年到头 (2008) and Feng Shui 万箭穿心 (2012); she later went on to contribute to costume picture Lady of the Dynasty 王朝的女人 杨贵妃 (2015) and the much more impressive female psychodrama SoulMate 七月与安生 (2016). Also credited, along with Xu, is Wang Peichen 王佩晨, who penned The Frightening Night. Framed as a mystery narrated by a foreign-trained psychologist, it starts with her telling the audience that she was involved in the case of a teenage girl’s bloody murder and then veers off into a story of her looking after a young woman traumatised by a car crash on whom she wants retribution for killing a relative. Though the psychologist – classily played by actress Feng Bo 冯波 (Invisible Killer 无形杀, 2009; Vegetate 我是植物人, 2010; both directed by Wang Jing) – is established as some kind of villain, the real mystery is how the two stories fit together.

Bumpily, as it turns out, though some fun is had along the way as the viewer is led to feel complicit in the main story without knowing the whole truth. It’s in the final haf-hour, however, when the film throws caution to the winds with a crazed finale in a mad doctor’s surgery that’s so far unique in Mainland horror movies, capped by a coda that finally sees the whole thing make sense.

Aside from Feng, who’s basically slumming it here, other performances are standard but get the job done. On a technical level the movie is made with considerable care, from the scratchy main-title sequence, through the various b&w flashbacks to the girl’s murder, to the spooky hotel and the (uncredited) music score. The original title means “A Young Girl’s Supernatural Diary”.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Film Academy Youth Film Studio (CN), Shanghai Huahan Jiesheng Film & TV (CN), Jia’nan Tiancheng Advertising (Beijing) (CN).

Script: Wu Nan, Xu Bin, Wang Peichen. Story: Yang Pan. Photography: Zhang Nan. Editing: Liu Qing, Zhang Jing. Music: uncredited. Art direction: Wu Lizhong. Costumes: Sun Yanxia. Sound: Liu Jie. Action: San Chou. Special effects: Li Quansheng. Executive direction: Li Bin.

Cast: Lu Chen (Zheng Xinling), Feng Bo (Xu Ningya), Zhou Yemang (Cao, hotel owner), Wu Linkai [Wu Guanfeng] (Gao Jiesen), Han Yifei (Li’na, Cao’s niece), Piao Junming (Shangguan), Han Jianfeng (Tang, hotel servant), Xiang Changqun (Cao’s wife), Lu Jia’ni (Xiaolan, Cao’s adoptive daughter), Wang Liqun (Zheng Xinling’s mother), Xu Jiayi (Xiaolan, aged 7).

Release: China, 11 Nov 2013.