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Edmund Lee

2/5 stars
A mobile phone belonging to a bullying victim who has killed herself and come back as a vengeful ghost is at the heart of Haunting Call, which marks a rare return to Hong Kong filmmaking for Danny Pang Fat (Death Stranding) after he spent most of the past decade working in mainland China.
An intermittently diverting horror that boasts a couple of interesting ideas, very clumsily thrown together, this low-budget film scripted and directed by Pang should be of cursory interest to those who liked The Eye and its sequels – which put Pang and his brother, Oxide Pang Chun, on the map – even if it isn’t very scary at all.
Similar to stories in that series, Haunting Call follows a young woman who starts to see ghosts. Unlike The Eye, however, Pang’s new film is so enamoured with its other themes – schoolyard bullying, revenge and female friendship – that it somehow forgets to make it unnerving for his protagonist.


Malaysian actress Lin Min-chen, fresh off the success of Table for Six and its sequel, plays Lily, a frustrated live streamer who discovers that her boyfriend has been sleeping with her best friend. Her fortune changes when she inexplicably steals a parcel from her neighbour, and it happens to contain the cursed phone.
From flashback scenes that open the film, we’ve learned that the ghost is that of Xiao Ya (Jessica Chan Yee-chun, Fresh Off Markham), a high-school student who jumped to her death after being brutally bullied by four schoolmates, including her former friend Carrie (Yvette Chan Shing-yu) and the cartoonish villain Betty (Kiki Tam).
After the ghost inflicts bloody punishment on Lily’s boyfriend on her behalf, and makes her live stream channel wildly profitable, it is the living woman’s turn to help the dead. She is tasked with taking the phone to each of Xiao Ya’s tormentors, where they are to be given a dose of their own medicine.
Marketed as the first Hong Kong horror feature to be shot entirely on a mobile phone, Haunting Call’s soft and occasionally hazy digital imagery does help Pang lend a dreamy impression to his narrative, beset as it is with paper-thin characters and glaring plot holes.

The idea of a mobile phone camera that can capture ghosts is an intriguing one, albeit one that Pang struggles to incorporate organically. The scene in which Lily becomes aware of Xiao Ya when her live-stream followers spot the ghost behind her has the makings of a classic jump scare; however, it is not remotely frightening.
Meanwhile, Haunting Call’s two spookiest scenes, where Lily goes on a couple of mostly wordless ghost-hunting visits to certifiably haunted sites for the eyes of her growing audience online, are merely tangential to the plot and feel like they exist in an entirely different film.
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Lin Min-chen in a still from Haunting Call.

Lin Min-chen in a still from Haunting Call (category IIB; Cantonese), co-starring Jessica Chan and directed by Danny Pang.

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A live streamer steals a mobile phone that serves as an instrument of revenge for a ghost she befriends. Intriguing, but don’t expect scares


A live streamer steals a mobile phone that serves as an instrument of revenge for a ghost she befriends. Intriguing, but don’t expect scares.


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Review

Review | Haunting Call movie review: Lin Min-chen sees ghosts in Danny Pang’s uneven horror

A live streamer steals a mobile phone that serves as an instrument of revenge for a ghost she befriends. Intriguing, but don’t expect scares