"Rule #1"

("Daiyat gye")

A Golden Village (in Singapore) release of a Fortune Star Entertainment (Hong Kong)/Scorpio East Entertainment, Dream Cinema, MediaCorp Raintree Pictures (Singapore) presentation of a Boku Films production. (International sales: Star Group, Selangor, Malaysia.) Produced by Lim Teck, Candy Leung. Directed by Kelvin Tong. Screenplay, Tong; story, Tong, John Powers.

With: Shawn Yue, Ekin Cheng, Stephanie Che, Fiona Xie.
(Cantonese dialogue)

Singaporean film-critic-turned-director Kelvin Tong gets the genre elements just about right in "Rule #1," a very dark buddy-cop movie cum ghost story shot and set in Hong Kong. With stars Shawn Yue and Ekin Cheng downplaying their usual hunk appeal, and some effective shocks in the twisting plot, the pic reps a big advance on Tong's previous horror item, "The Maid," though in the West, it's largely an ancillary item beyond specialty fests. B.O. in Singapore for the March release was fine.

The main title sequence, of cops Wong (Cheng) and Lee (Yue) running through the streets, sets up the movie's don't-believe-everything-you-see tone. Cut to three months earlier, and patrolman Sgt. Lee is shown stopping a driver who isn't wearing a seatbelt; in the resulting altercation, Lee almost gets killed and "sees" a bloody female ghost.

Forty-nine days later, Lee is out of hospital but still suffering from nightmares. As he won't retract his story about the ghost, he's transferred to the shadowy Miscellaneous Affairs Dept., and to a supposedly haunted swimming pool where an 8-year-old recently drowned. There, he meets his boss, Inspector Wong, a heavy drinker who tells him that Rule No. 1 is, "There are no ghosts."

Cold lensing by d.p. Venus Keung and a superb effects track by sound designers Ken Wong and David Wong slowly layer an impression of "everything is possible" as, in some tensely staged sequences, Lee sees the drowned boy scampering around the changing rooms.

Script by Tong, from an original story by him and American film critic John Powers, doesn't fully reconcile the creepy central idea with the side plot of a serial-killer-cum-child-molester at large. And the $2.3 million budget keeps the action within modest limits, with no flashy f/x.

Still, working with a pro Hong Kong team, Tong makes the most of the latter constraint, drawing perfs from his two leads (especially Cheng) that are much more contained than usual, and concentrating on atmosphere rather than CG. The tone gets blacker and blacker as the plot unfolds.

Supports, including Singaporean Fiona Xie as Lee's schoolteacher wife and Stephanie Che as Wong's other half, are solid. Pic makes little use of recognizable Hong Kong landmarks and could almost be set in any Cantonese-speaking city.

© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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