"Help"

("Qiu Wo" -- China)

A Shanghai Yixin Culture Transfer Co., China Film Group release of a China Film & Television Prod. Corp. production. (International sales: Media Asia, Hong Kong.) Produced by Zhang Qi. Executive producer, Gao Jianmin. Directed, written by Zhang Qi.
 
With: Song Jia, Shi Liang, Zhu Hongjia, Asiru, Liu Bo, Guan Xiaotong, Lu Xing, Wang Liping.
(Mandarin dialogue)

After several attempts in recent years, China gets its first all-out C-horror in "Help," a thoroughly formulary but smoothly assembled femme-in-peril scarefest that can stand alongside similar genre fodder from South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan. Starring an OK Song Jia (from the glossy psychodrama "Curiosity Kills the Cat"), this has ancillary possibilities in the West on specialist Asian labels and even a whiff of remake potential. Fantasy fest slots look a given for this January local release.

Song plays Jiang Yan, a psychology grad in a northern Chinese city (pic was partly shot in Tianjin) who's desperate to win a chance to study in the U.S. from her professor, Liu Feng (TV drama thesp Shi Liang). Her dissertation involves interviewing a former mental patient (Liu Bo), who still believes his young daughter (Guan Xiaotong) is alive.

Jiang's competitor for the overseas post is her friend Xiao Lin (Asiru), whom she discovers is having an affair with the prof. Already stressed out and prone to bouts of morning sickness -- though a doc says she's not pregnant -- Jiang accidentally knocks out her live-in b.f., Wu Zheng (Zhu Hongjia), when he suspects her of seducing the prof.

At the half-hour mark, pic cranks up the simmering menace when the prof shows up to help and ends up finishing off the b.f with a screwdriver. Thereafter, the hysterical Jiang finds herself haunted by Wu's ghost, but after the prof helps her bury the corpse, she begins to suspect she's been caught in an elaborate trap.

This being a mainland Chinese thriller, any ghosts have to be explained logically. But writer-director Zhang Qi, in his first feature after docus and shorts, uses the device to deliver extra twists in the final reels. Solution to the whole mystery is hardly complex.

Whole shebang is confidently manufactured from generic building blocks, with a classic three-act structure. Moldy color scheme of the HD-originated lensing fits the copious interior scenes in Jiang's apartment like a glove, and Liu Junpeng's part-creepy-crawly, part-romantic score adds a pro edge. Onscreen the whole time, in a story told entirely from her character's perspective, Song screams on cue, but Shi delivers the most mature perf as the prof.

Chinese title literally means "Help Me."

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