Review | 49 Days movie review: illogical crime mystery a sloppy attempt to appeal to fans of recent Taiwanese horror hits
- VR technology and the supernatural go head-to-head in this Taiwanese horror starring Lewis Liu as a man plagued by dreams of a spooky woman in red
- It may have a novel premise, but 49 Days is so confusing and poorly executed that it feels like the filmmakers gave up trying to make the plot make sense
1/5 stars
The horror genre is enjoying something of a revival in Taiwanese cinema, with creepy hits including The Tag-Along series and video game adaptation Detention scaring up some major business at the box office. Writer-producer Pan Chih-yuan may be hoping his tale of old and new colliding can capitalise on this popularity, but 49 Days is sadly incoherent.
It’s not just the film’s protagonists who are thrown into confusion as a murder investigation becomes entangled in a supernatural mystery, but its audiences as well.
Confusion and misdirection lie at the heart of Louis Chan Chia-wei’s debut feature. 49 Days is touted as the first film to combine virtual reality technology and the traditional witchcraft of guanluoyin, meaning “visiting hell” – but good luck finding anyone who cares to make a second such film.
Chinese-American actor Lewis Liu stars as Daniel, a VR development company executive who is fired after messing up a crucial presentation. He is plagued by a recurring dream of a mysterious woman in red (Chen Tien-jen), which wakes him at 4:44am each morning and seems linked to a bizarre countdown that appears on his arm.
Daniel is referred to a police sketch artist in the hope of identifying the woman, but the artist dies in a bizarre incident in Daniel’s office. His life and sanity quickly unravel as he becomes the prime suspect in detective Yi-zhen’s (Lorene Jen Jung-hsuan) investigation.
Chan’s wayward direction – which muddies the waters between what’s real and imaginary, and between what is legitimately supernatural and mere digital manipulation – does little to bring rhyme or reason to Pan’s formless screenplay.
The unspooling mystery is so defiantly opposed to logic that, at the film’s conclusion, the narrator admits to the audience that “nobody knows” what really happened, and that some things are simply meant to “remain a mystery”.
One suspects that what actually happened is the filmmakers realised, post-production, that their film made no sense. Instead of a substantial rewrite, they added some clumsy post-synced dialogue to explain away this yawning chasm of lapsed logic.
Needless to say, their quick fix doesn’t work – the problems with 49 Days are numerous, haunting and the stuff of nightmares.
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