Written By

Dir. Wai Ka-fai
Starring: Lau Ching-wan, Mia Yam, Kelly Lin
Hong Kong, 2009, 86 mins.

Billed as one of the most ambitious Hong Kong films of the year, Written By is director Wai Ka-fai’s story about how a family grapples with death.

The film opens with a horrific car accident, which kills the family’s patriarch, Tong (played humorously by Hong Kong star Lau Ching-wan). Survived by his wife, son and daughter, the family remains in mourning years later. Tong’s daughter, Melody (played by Mia Yam), who was blinded after the car accident, decides to rewrite the family’s fate by writing a novel about what would happen had Tong survived and the rest of the family had died in the crash. In Melody’s story, Tong’s family is able to enjoy his presence as ghosts coming in and out of his life, while the story also takes on a parallel level of reality, co-equal with the first: Tong is blind and is writing a story to bring his family back to life. Confused?

Written By wavers in and out of drama and comedy, although it is not entirely sure that the film is meant to have any humorous moments at all. Also, as Wai takes the audience through stories of grief, he also takes us to a rather unbelievable afterlife, containing witches and some unfortunate computer enhancements, possibly what Harry Potter may have looked like on a shoestring budget.

Overall, Written By was not all that good, mainly because it was not at all believable. The film was predominantly overacted and the musical score only highlighted the anticlimactic, almost laughable, and shallow way in which the subject of grief was dealt with in the film.