The Cinematheque

“Ching takes [the genre] into the romance of unreason and profane beauty, a surrealist impulse that devours the boundaries of the possible … There’s no telling where Ching’s quest for exquisite incongruities may lead.”

Howard Hampton, Film Comment

Set a century after the first Chinese Ghost Story, this final entry in Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung’s series serves as a reboot, swapping Leslie Cheung’s tax collector for Fong, a monk-in-training played by a pre-stardom Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Chungking Express). The series’s genre balance is also recalibrated here: ancient folk mystery largely cedes the stage to a tone that prefigures the mix of mythic fantasy and screwball sex comedy in Tsui’s Green Snake. Joey Wong returns as a ghost (this time named Lotus); her sister Butterfly (Nina Li Chi) is a kindred spirit as well as a rival. Where the first film’s human-ghost attraction was shadowed by fate, here Fong’s ascetic robes are a flimsy alibi against carnal desire—the romance conjured between him and Butterfly is spectacular, unserious, and forbidden. Lau Shun, as a master martial artist, and Jacky Cheung’s mercenary swordsman provide early-CG assists to the hair-whipping, demon-tongue flicking action.

In Cantonese with English subtitles