Emotional movie that touches on life and death
If you’ve seen the trailer, you may think this is a mystery/horror movie but don’t be fooled. There are two arcs in this: first half fools you into thinking its horror and the latter half is emotional and a real tearjerker.
Basic rundown of this story without spoilers: the female lead notices her neighbors being weird and tries to find out the reason. There is also a strange light shop down the street that she is suspicious of. She works with her boyfriend to discover the truth. The director does a good job using colour to portray the mood of the scene- using dark contrast for the “horror” and warm tones for other scenes.Additionally, the metaphor of using lightbulbs to represent human life is the heart of this movie. Characters enter the light shop to get their lightbulb, others don’t have one, and some choose to give up their lightbulb.
You can tell they had a good budget and spent a lot of effort and time to create this movie. The transition between scenes and flashbacks was so smooth, you get pulled into the story even more.
There were a lot of familiar faces in this: Zhang Ruo Nan, Bai Yu Fan, Zheng Kai (cameo), Sun Qian, and Liu Yi Jun. They really embraced their characters. Bai Yu Fan and Zhang Ruo Nan’s emotional scenes especially broke me. I was bawling at the end of the movie.
The characters, I must say, since it was a movie runtime, there wasn’t enough for me to care, but they’ve shown enough story-wise for me to get invested and stick till the end. For FL, it’s been a while since I’ve watched Zhang Ruo Nan. She became even prettier (ughhh!!!), like flowers around me every time she showed up on the screen. I was basically in love with this girl. Her acting? even great, she did a good job. ML, mostly about him was shown in the last minutes of the movie, but imo he’s aight. The LGBT couple is what really tickled my heart because the moment Sun Qian’s character showed up, I felt the feels man and they had a good chemistry. It’s my first time seeing Sun Qian take on an LGBT role/pairing and honestly, you could take those two, have them do a GL drama and it’ll probably work. The mother and daughter were also very sad, like goddamn. I went from hating the mother to understanding why she was presented the way she is and the child actress was so good, she didn’t have to go that hard on her acting delivery. The old man was aight. His side plot was like another extra variety.
Overall, a good movie, would recommend you check it out. The upcoming Korean version is a series, so it’ll probably fix what this movie couldn’t show in the 98-minute runtime it had.
It’s better to watch it first then the Korean drama…I keep comparing both of them. Well whether it’s movie or drama, they have Unique POV and beautiful in their own way.
It’s only me or I watched the wrong version? The office man with slithed stomach only appeared in early scenes. Meanwhile in K-drama version he appeared from the start till the ending, had his own conclusion.
Anyway, both version is sad. Can’t imagine watching that movie in cinema.
