Movie review: Haunting ‘Phantom of the Theatre’

Though it sounds like one, the Chinese movie Phantom of the Theatre is not a rip-off of The Phantom of the Opera. That doesn't mean it’s unprecedented.

The movie combines ghost story, tragic romance and revenge melodrama, plus the spontaneous human combustion gambit from Tsui Hark's 2010 Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Fortunately, veteran Hong Kong director Raymond Yip Wai-man mashes all this together with a tremendous sense of style.

Set in circa-1930 Shanghai, the story involves a theater that has been abandoned since an acrobatic troupe burned to death there 13 years earlier. Viewers will notice that the place still looks great, with no sign of fire damage. That's just one illogical detail among dozens in this amusingly nutty tale.

Novice filmmaker Weibang (Tony Yo-ning Yang) decides to shoot a spooky love story in the theater, which is widely believed to be haunted. He casts pretty starlet Si Fan (Ruby Lin) and gives the male lead to himself.

Off-camera yearnings are inevitable, and when apart, the two are linked by vivid nightmares. Meanwhile, the fresh corpses of enigmatically incinerated victims are dispatched from the theater to the forensic pathologist (Huang Huan), who just happens to be Weibang's girlfriend.

Filmed entirely on sets, Phantom glories in its own artifice. The movie is carried by sweeping widescreen images, dynamic camera movements, impressive special effects and a color scheme that contrasts icy blues against fiery reds.

There may not be any actual ghosts in that theater, but the CGI is uncanny.

In Mandarin with English subtitles

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This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 8:02 AM with the headline "Movie review: Haunting ‘Phantom of the Theatre’."