The premise of this film is startling: Imagine a place where everything abandoned and forgotten, all the thrown-away toys and the unwritten books, the unfulfilled plans, the dead and the unborn are still somehow present. This is a premise that easily attracts all kinds of stories and images, emotions and philosophical ruminations. What would you find in the Re-Cycle? What would you seek, and what would you come across that you were not thinking about? It is quite hard to make a totally bad film from this premise.

And "Re-Cycle" is not a totally bad film. It just misses most opportunities the premise offers. The Pang Brothers decided to film it as a mixture of horror and computer game, and the good stuff is struggling under the load of annoying genre conventions. It is sad to watch when the heroine has to solve some superfluous task ("Cross the bridge without breathing, or the dead will chase you"),when there is so much more interesting and meaningful that could happen instead. How else could you turn a person's inner self into a series a landscapes? Also, the relation with the little girl never gains the substance it needs to make the ending convincing. Sure, there is some amazing imagery here, and some of it even makes sense. But the film left me longing for a remake by somebody who handles both the imagery and the complexity of the idea.

By the way, if you feel the same, check out "After Life" by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. It is very low-key visually, but explores a similarly striking idea in great depth and with great humanity.

The best way to enjoy this film would be to experience it knowing as little as possible. I've tried in the review to say as little as possible, however there is a chance I may have said too much. You may wish to consider seeing the film first before proceeding.

The problem with this movie is that unless you go in and take it for what it is, with no preconceived notions odds are you are going to be disappointed. For me, seeing this after reading some less than stellar reviews I was ready for a film that was going to disappoint. To my shock and amazement I was surprised to find that the film is a flawed masterpiece and probably one of the best films of the year.

The story of a young writer who ends up stuck in her own novel (literally) and has to find its way out is being marketed as a horror film pretty much across the board. The problem is that after the first twenty five minutes of creepy scary build up the film shifts gears and becomes something else. Certainly there are still horrific elements but the film is more a mythic quest along the lines of Alice in Wonderland, or one of the classic quest tales or perhaps even Andre Tarkovsky's Stalker.

The bulk of the film set in The Re-Cycle (the films English title) is set in a place were everything lost or forgotten goes. People, toys, characters, city blocks, memories, everything goes to this place. Its a jumble of places and people many half remembered. Its a place that is visually stunning to look at and is often amazing to look at. The films story line is also a jumble of pieces that refer back to other films or comics or books (for example Neil Gaiman's Sandman, What Dreams May Come, Spirited Away, Night of the Living Dead). Some have said that the film makes no narrative sense and is more candy for the eye instead of the head, but I would argue against that since a world as jumbled as this would create a series of quests as equally jumbled. Its as if you dreamed about the five different movies you watched before bed and then linked them in your mind as you slept. The structure and seeming referential nature of the set pieces seems to support this idea.

As I stated at the start the film also suffers from the not being a straight horror film all the way through. There is more than just the notion of scaring the audience at work here. Yes the film has a couple of good scares and a few moments where your stomach knots in unease, but the film is actually about something else. What that is isn't really clear until towards the end so the film ends up shifting tones three or four or five times in its two hour span. I know this shifting gears and recreating itself as something else probably going to disappoint hardcore horror fans, but ultimately it allows for a growth of characters and story lines into places you might not fully expect.

This is a masterpiece.

In the interest of full disclosure I do have to say that the film isn't perfect. Some of the creatures are a bit too rubbery and fake, which is at odds with much of the fine work on things like the long necked corpses. There are also a few lapses in the visual effects where its clear that things are not real, which is often glaring considering that many of the films vistas, from deranged amusement park to mountains in the sky are so real as to be almost matter of fact.

I really loved this movie a great deal. Its rare film that not only tries, but succeeds in being more than just one thing. It manages to take old things and turn them into something new. Its just a wonderful experience for those who are willing to be open to what it is, and not what you thin it should be.

Trust the Pang Brothers to come up with something unique and unsettling all in one go. I've been a fan of the directors even since I saw THE EYE, and RE-CYCLE continues in the same sort of style, albeit with a twist. The central character is a tormented novelist who finds that her apartment is haunted by a long-haired female ghost, but it turns out to be merely the precursor to an even weirder storyline...

RE-CYCLE begins as a traditional ghost story in the vein of THE GRUDGE before turning into a dark fantasy that has more in line with SILENT HILL. The storyline is very slim and rather stretched to fill out the running time, and the central character is rather unlikeable. However, both these things are secondary to what is an almost entirely visual experience, and one quite unlike anything you've seen before.

RE-CYCLE transports the viewer into a weird kind of afterlife populated by forgotten things: the forgotten dead, forgotten toys, even aborted babies in a political sub-plot. Aided by some not-bad CGI effects, the main character wanders through this weird landscape, trying to make sense of what she discovers. The twists may be obvious, but for a film filled with ghosts this has many scare scenes. The ghosts look frightening, even if they're CGI, and this film manages a lift set-piece that's very nearly as scary as the one in THE EYE; not quite, though.