Ann Hui's original movie starring Shu Qi and Eason Chan was a gorgeously filmed and very atmospheric ghost movie with a strong script and good acting performances that opened the floodgates for a bevy of similarly-themed films of the "I see ghosts" variety. The strongest and most effective of those recent copycat movies was probably THE EYE.

So how does Visible Secret II fare in comparison? Well, it doesn't quite reach the standard set by its predecessor, but still manages to hold its own.

The film starts extremely slow, and for the first 30 minutes or so the story really drags quite a bit. Newlyweds Jack (Eason Chan) and his wife Ching (Jo Kuk) move into a new apartment, Eason gets run over by a car, resulting in a coma from which he then miraculously recovers. However, creepy things start to happen at the apartment and furthermore, his wife shows signs of being possessed by a ghost. All of this has been seen in hundreds of movies before, and is presented at a slow pace that borders on being boring. However, things pick up with the arrival of Jack's friend September (Cherie Ying) - together, they start to investigate the cause of all these spooky shenanigans, and the film immediately starts to become more interesting. Unfortunately, the film presents the audience with a lot of twists and angles that turn out to be red herrings (eg the pervert neighbor) and that are unrelated to the actual storyline, resulting in some degree of viewer frustration. Only towards the end do the various narrative strands finally start to come together, building up to a tense finale that ends in yet another surprise twist.

Overall, the film presents the story in a rather pedestrian fashion, with some pretty dull passages and a few too many twists, and while it aims for atmospheric suspense, it never manages to become truly scary or frightening (the way THE EYE did). Still, it invests the main characters with enough flesh and blood to make the audience care about them, with Jo Kuk in particular giving a strong yet restrained performance.

Marginal recommendation.