Based on the novel of the same name, Night Corridor is one bizarre collage of a film. It’s not quite a feature length piece, and it’s not a short either, coming in at the rather moderate 73 minutes. Part Jacob’s Ladder, part Angel Heart, a shizophrenic nightmare with a paedophiloc priest, homosexual desire, and pregnant ghosts. It’s not your average Sunday family matinee.

Daniel Wu plays Sam Yeung, a art student and successful photographer living in London. One morning he wakes up to the ring of his telephone, informing him that his brother Ah Hung had died in an accident. He’s been invited to the funeral, but it’s up to him if he wishes to return to Hong Kong. Feeling a need to return, he does so to find his mother has married a Chinese speaking Indian by the name of Singh, who has more hair than the abomniable snow man, and enough fur on his back alone to warm the whole of the North Pole for a few hundred years. His mother is an alcoholic, and drinking more due to the death of her son.

Sam’s old priest enters the picture as a source of solace for the mother, unaware of the abuse he imposed as an adult to the child. Both the priest and Daniel are still very much aware of what went on, including the fact the priest would film the abuse on tape for later, personal hand shakes. A secret is being kept from Sam, and it turns out it involves the death of his brother, which seems to have been under more mysterious circumstances. It seems that not all is cut and dry as it seems, and much of his past is coming back from nowhere to haunt and frustrate him.

Visiting a library after a phone call, he learns his brother was in fact killed wild monkeys at a zoo. Ah Hung’s arms and legs were torn off, as were other parts and limbs and thus died a rather painful death. Sam feels confused and his comforted by the librarian, but he too seems to have his own agenda. In fact, it seems like Sam can trust no one, and no one seems to offer him a straight answer.

Funded by an arts council, this film really comes off as a student art film. My initial use of the word collage wasn’t whimiscal but within context, as scenes jump from one to the next in such rapid succession that I could barely keep up with the events taking place. All within 73 minutes of film. Imagine the entire Back to the Future trilogy condensed into a one hour, and that’s the sort of headache you will entertain keeping up. The rate of change from past, to present and then future, back to past is confusing as it is slightly disturbing, It’s an interesting ghost story, which is what it primarily is.

Performances are not bad, though at times even I found it hard to believe some of the face pulling that went on, and the over compensation of acting that occured during particular scenes. The prolonged masturbation scene was a little odd, as was the requested raping and forced male oral sex (it’s simulated and suggested, as opposed to being graphically shown) at gun point. There’s twists and turns, and the whole pregnant ghost thing was even more strange. There’s no actual conclusion to the film as such, as they seem to have gone for a rather ambigious end, just as the rest of the film clearly is an attempt at confusing the hell of the audience. You understand all the scenes, and most of how it fits together, but there are more questions than there are answers, and most seem unintentional and some not so.

Night Corridor certainly messed up my head, coupled with the pace and the number of substories thrown together, it’s an incredibly unsatisfying end to the film which hasn’t even started before it’s ended. Such is the speed that character development doesn’t even exist, and we have no understanding about Sam, except how he gets from A to B to C, only to find that he actually forgot about B and now can’t find his way back to A and doesn’t even know C exists.

There doesn’t seem to be any message or context in the film, with the paedophilia simply being a vehicle for action, rather than any implied reasoning to it’s inclusion. THe homosexual slant seems to be a case of sexual abuse leading to latent homosexuality, resulting in a submissive attitude towards abuse. I often thought the reverse was true, and that boys that are victims of molestation and rape are sometimes prone to carrying out the abuse they’ve lived with. In any case, there’s still context to this aspect of the film and the character. A film as long as this is, with the number of topics it tries to cover, you simply wonder whether this was a blatant exercise in “shock and sell” than to tell an actual story. Style over substance, perhaps?

Night Corridor has a lot going for it, but it just feels completed too early, with a possibility of a low budget or lack of funds resulting in the length and quick exploration of ideas. There’s a lot in there that could have been developed, but just doesn’t get the screen time to do so and as such it fails to justify any reason to watch it, unless you want to take a couple of paracetamol afterwards and trash the disc for making you feel lousy about wasting your time watching a confusing array of images that don’t really make much sense.

Verdict: Good ideas, lousy and lazy execution. Lacks cohesion and completeness, so not worth the time