Double Vision – Fünf Höllen bis zur Unsterblichkeit (2002)

Double Vision – Fünf Höllen bis zur Unsterblichkeit: Directed by Kuo-Fu Chen. With Tony Ka Fai Leung, David Morse, Rene Liu, Leon Dai. An FBI Agent pairs with a troubled Taiwan cop to hunt for a serial killer who’s embedding a mysterious fungus in the brains of victims.

“When Edgar Allan Poe wrote Rue Morgue and other Dupin stories, he is said to have created two branches of the detective-novel: the sensational and the deductive. Trying to reconcile elements of the detective with the supernatural the way traditional Taiwan has married Westernization, DOUBLE VISION–quite the adequate title–is a hybrid worth watching for its bastardy. The detective part suffers when the movie ventures into the supernatural, and the former has holes of its own without the latter. However, once youu0026#39;ve taken the Red Pill and bought the protagonistu0026#39;s story about his daughter, these holes in logic somewhat become intrinsic to elements of the supernatural, and the unexplained becomes the unexplainable that is plainly accepted. This fallacy grows on the film like the hallucinatory mold the plot revolves around, and DOUBLE VISION gains dreamy and poetic dimensions. Undoubtedly, this is not the deductive type of mystery–the cancer of sensationalism is as terminal as a brain tumor better left not operated: it is the entire charm of the movie.”