A mother and her son are disturbed by the presence of a stranger as they wait for the return of the father from work.
“The Lingering” starts off promisingly right up until a finale that can only be described as confusing and meandering. Dawa is a young boy who lives with his mother in the Hong Kong countryside. It is Chinese New Year and they are waiting for Dawa’s father to return from the city but as the evening drags on with no sign of him, strange occurrences begin to transpire in the house. Dawa speaks of an Uncle who likes to play hide and seek with him and initially, his mother shrugs it off as a child’s overactive imagination but she quickly realizes that he is telling the truth as she begins to experience strange phenomena herself. Eventually, she travels to the factory where her husband works and is told that he and a group of men were killed when mudslides flooded the building. Identifying the body, Dawa raises the cover of another man and tells her that he is the man he played hide and seek with in the house. Upon returning home, Dawa’s grandmother informs them that their house is indeed haunted as she experienced some of it herself and she blesses the house to rid it of evil.
Thirty years later, Dawa (Louis Cheung) is a successful chef and restaurateur and lives in the city with his girlfriend Lily (Tong Yao). When he receives a phone call stating that his mother was found dead in a local pond, he and Lily return home so he can identify the body. Because the corpse was in the water for a long time, he is told it is bloated but he recognizes her from a bracelet she had worn her whole life. He makes his way back to his old home to search for the house records with the intent of selling the place but once there, he and Lily begin to experience strange goings-on which brings back memories of that fateful night as a child he spent with his mother being persecuted by malevolent spirits. Dawa attributes the haunting of the house to the spirit of his late mother and tells Lily that she didn’t want him to leave home to go to the city when he was younger but he did so because he knew he couldn’t stay in the house forever. Now he must try to figure out a way to appease her spirit so that she will leave them alone.
The overall “haunted house” narrative of “The Lingering” is pretty straightforward but where it stumbles is in the last act. We are led to believe that his mother is dead and the fact that the house is empty supports this notion but after Lily is rushed to the hospital after a ghostly encounter, Dawa makes his way back to the house one more time to face off with the spirit of his deceased mother but at the last minute, Lily appears with his mother in tow and explains to him that she is suffering from dementia and was in the same hospital where she was. She had been living in the hospital because she couldn’t remember where her address was and the movie ends with the three of them living back in the house. In an earlier scene, Dawa is attacked by a supernatural entity but then a cloaked figure appears and screams at the entity to leave her son alone. If his mother was in the hospital all along, then who was the ghostly apparition who appeared and said Dawa was her son? Also, when Dawa and Lily go to the morgue to identify the body, it is too unrecognizable but Dawa assumes it is her because of a bracelet on the corpse’s wrist that he later states his mother always wore so how did the corpse come into the possession of his mother’s bracelet?
The film opens up way too many subplots with most of them never receiving any additional recognition or closure so by the time the final credits begin to roll, you have a list of questions that never get answered and because of this, it takes away from the movie’s positive aspects, namely the location of the house and the scare factor, which is executed superbly, especially in the opening of the film. Directors Ho Pong Mak and Derrick Tao maintain a constant atmosphere of dread throughout that rarely lets up. Had the finale and some of the major story arcs received the proper resolution they so deserved, the movie as a whole would have fared much better. As it stands, “The Lingering” offers some genuinely frightening moments early on, it’s just a pity the rest of the film isn’t proportionate to the first half.
Available on Blu-ray™ Combo Pack, DVD, and Digital October 15th
