REVIEW: Walk With Me (2019)
Let's take a look back an older review, and this time its for a Hong Kong/Malaysia co-production whose Chinese title translates to "Double Soul"
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Supernatural possession movies seem to be the bread and butter of Hong Kong cinema, I’ve seen so many of them lately that it’s almost hard for the screenwriters to come up with something original.
And while not 100% original, if you stick to the end of this movie, you’ll be rewarded with something different.
Whether you’ll like what it offers, well that’s a different question. Read on to find out more about Walk With Me.
Plot
This review contains spoilers.
Sam works at a garment factory as the floor supervisor. Every day at work she suffers from bullying at the hands of Fa, one of the older women under her command. Her home life isn’t any better. Her mum suffers from the pain of losing her unborn son due to a miscarriage, and her father is a drunken gambler who steals all the family’s money.
But Sam has a doll, Dao Dao, who she suspects is possessed by a ghost child. The doll has a habit of reappearing after it goes missing, and usually with the consequences. When Sam runs into an old childhood friend named York, her life takes a deadly turn as the people who have wronged her end up dead.
From initial viewing, and watching the vision playing in this review (if you’ve click on the video above), this movie looks like your standard average jump-scare horror film. In fact, even at about the three-quarter mark of the movie, I would have classified this as just another teen horror film, but then something clever happened. The movie spun a few things around, and added a new theme that while very interesting, wasn’t as well handled as it could have been.
And it’s a shame about how it was handled, as this movie had the potential to really connect with a particular audience, and I might guess that the stigma involved with mental illness and homosexuality in places like Malaysia and other South East Asian countries could be the reason why these themes weren’t more deeply explored.
And here’s where the spoilers are going to be discussed. You’ve been warned.
You see Sam, the girl, is not actually a girl – but a boy, York. I mentioned in the intro that the Chinese title “Double Soul’ would make sense later in the movie, and it does when you consider that Sam is a manifestation of York’s imagination – a way for York to hide his femininity to the world. In his head, he is actually a girl.
This explains the incessant bullying he experiences at work, the favouritism with his boss who is also hiding his homosexuality and the shame his parents feel over his existence. The doll is his crutch, or safety blanket, that he uses as an excuse for his inevitable violent actions.
By the end of the film, you do feel sorry for Sam. All his life, his mother has made him feel guilty over the death of his unborn brother, so to him his unborn brother is the evil, it’s what caused everything to change for him.
The movie’s subtle way of explaining Sam’s behaviour is its weakest point. Certainly, if this movie was made in the USA or Europe, it probably would have been handled in the other extreme, which then would have done the story even less justice.
So in the end we are left with a movie that will most likely confuse most of the audience who end up watching it, and decry it as a poor film. And that’s a little unfair. Undoubtably the themes are hamstrung by the country of origin responsible for producing the film – they probably wanted the teen possession film the first half feels like, where as the last part of the film feels like something the director probably wanted to make.
Have you seen or are interested in watching Walk With Me? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments and if you agree or disagree with my review.
Genre Horror
Director Ryon Lee
Starring Michelle Wai, Richard Ng
Original Title 雙魂
Country of Origin Hong Kong and Malaysia
Release Date August 22 2019