There are people who have gone to China and come out better for it. A fervently anti-communist Richard Nixon re-fashioned himself into an elder statesman of the world in 1972. The crass and lowbrow director Wong Jing escaped the shuttering of the Hong Kong film industry and in the bargain, developed into a more competent and mainstream director in the 90s. Oxide Pang, one half of the Pang Brothers (Bangkok Dangerous, The Eye) who brought us innovations in storytelling and horror filmmaking, does not number among these fortunate people.
Flawed as it is, Sleepwalker presents an ideal case study of the conventions of filmmaking in China. From its missteps, we can extrapolate the limitations of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s recently released guidelines to develop China's 'soft power’ and maintain its 'cultural security'.
Cinematic fare coming out of China have been mainstream and crowdpleasing, with the neo-western wuxia, period drama, historical fantasy, and rom-com genres dominating releases in the past decade. Yet one genre remains strictly banned to this day – modern horror. [see: http://shanghaiist.com/2010/10/20/horror_films.php]
It appears that Oxide Pang made Sleepwalker in China by promising China’s funders and cultural censorship committees that it would not be a horror film. It also appears that Oxide Pang was still intent on making a horror film of some sort. It is evident that Oxide Pang is somewhat aware of the psychological thriller/horror genre that Korean directors have developed and subsequently worn out in the past decade, and chooses to mould Sleepwalker in similar fashion.
Yet what can one make out of a psychological thriller/horror film that is neither scary and not particularly thrilling? This genre works only because the scares must feel real, that the supernatural elements up to the first plot twist or reveal must feel plausible and genuine. Post reveal, the unreliable (and often mentally disturbed) protagonist must be seen to function in a mundane, ordinary world whose very real dangers translate into a harrowing experience that the audience now sees as a straight-up thriller.
In Sleepwalker, it is established so early on (within the first 10 minutes, in fact) that there are no such things as ghosts or the supernatural, that this is no horror film, that our protagonist is a few cards short of a full deck and a major script rewrite away from being an empathetic character even then. Yet Pang continues to assault the audience with a bevy of cheap scares for no good reason for more than a good hour after that. Either you'll be annoyed, irritated, and then finally just indifferent to the film, or you'll grow painfully aware to Pang's very painfully limited tricks of the trade – jump cuts, a screeching violin and trumpet soundtrack, and very fast shadowy figures moving across the screen.
And when the film belatedly moves on to its psychological thriller portion, it lets you down too. The 'real' world that Sleepwalker presents in its police procedural portion is so full of normal people and institutions behaving in a bizarre and illogical manner that it's impossible to watch this as a thriller.
To give more details about this film would be to degenerate into cruel heckling of its failure to scare, entertain, or even string together a coherent story that is either conforms to genre expectations and conventions or is otherwise believable. Rather, I present you this explanation of why it failed because it's more heartbreaking.