I honestly think this might be the first time I’ve actually enjoyed a proper horror BL. I’ve checked out a few others in the past, but they usually felt a bit unpolished or amateurish—I can’t even remember their names, to be honest. This one is definitely a slow-burn rather than a fast-paced romance, tucked away inside a world of supernatural mysteries and fantastic secrets. You can tell the production is high-quality and well-researched; it feels like the creators really pushed themselves to give the audience something fresh. If you’re into BLs mixed with suspense and ghost stories, this is right up your alley. Just a heads-up: it’s a massive time investment. There are 12 episodes, each over 75 minutes, and the finale is basically a two-hour movie. The story follows Khem, a young guy in his twenties whose life is getting harder by the second because of a heavy family curse that lets him see ghosts. There’s this terrifying rule in his family where the boys don’t live past age 20, so hi...
Five strangers (4 men and a girl) have come together for a mysterious attempt at closure with an unseen man locked up in the room next door. An ambiguous tension is created around their intentions and his fate. Each of them has been in a painful relationship with him, whether sexual or not. Slowly they each share their most secret fantasy and an anecdote about the reality of their relationship with him. Each fantasy reveals some kind of sadomasochistic desire. Each real life anecdote illustrates that the reality of cruelty and manipulation in a relationship, however banal the circumstances, is neither fulfilling or fun. Somehow, for their own reasons, they all put up with it, just so that they could spend their time with him. But what happens privately with that man in the room stays private and their secret.
The biggest problem of the film, according to me, is no resolution. The film ends as open as it started. It is so heavy on dialogues throughout the film, that as an audience you do not get any breather, which, for me, became extremely tiring after a while. The plot is ambiguous and the motivations and desires of these individuals are not clear. I mean, we are not even told why each of these people think that he’s the worst and deserves punishment. We never go into that discussion. They discuss his personality traits but none of them actually go into detail about why he’s such a terrible guy. This film could possibly work in a theatre setting with some additional urgency and tension thrown in. As a film, this was very disappointing. (3.5/10)
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