Rating: 3.5/5
After a boating accident in Yehliu, police find a man’s body washed up on shore. Beside him is a woman’s purse, but no other bodies. They believe it to be Ko Jing-Min and call his younger sister, Ko Fon-Jiao, to identify the body.
Wang Yi-Ming waits for his wife, Ruiyun, but neither he nor his employee, Miss Liu, know where she is. Ko Fon-Jiao, who lives next door, determined that Ruiyun and Jing-Min were lovers and had eloped. Humiliated, Yi-Ming becomes repressed, leaving his daughter Shuyuan feeling abandoned—she sings a song about it and everything. Meanwhile, Fon-Jiao becomes Shuyuan’s friend and watches her when Yi-Ming is out.
Some time passes, and Ruiyun’s sister, Ruimei, comes back to Taiwan from Singapore. Miss Liu sends Ruimei a letter to hire her as Shuyuan’s tutor. Miss Liu hopes that the resemblance to Shuyan’s mother will comfort Shuyan. A passenger on the train, recognizing the seal on the letter, fills Ruimei in on Yi-Ming’s debauchery and abandonment of his daughter, predicting a terrible fate for her if she goes. It turns out that this is Fon-Jiao’s younger brother.
What secrets await Ruimei? No one found her sister’s body. Is she still alive? Or will Ruimei befall a similar fate?
Based on the Gothic novel Mistress of Mellyn, the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture considers this film one of the pinnacles of the first wave of Taiwanese-language cinema that ran from 1955-1972, starting with Descendants of the Yellow Emperor and fading with the influx of genre films in the 60s and 70s. Critics at the time considered the mix of family melodrama, romance, and supernatural elements to be quite experimental for the time.
This is the earliest Taiwanese film that Letterboxd categorizes as horror that I’ve been able to find. In 2018, the Taiwan Film Institute restored the film from a scratched-up print. The restoration looks outstanding. While some of the more ambitious effects are rough around the edges, the filmmaking is sharp.
The score combines scores from different movies, lifted to match the particular tone of the scene. In the climax, the James Bond theme plays—it works, but it’s so recognizable.
My apologies for the mixed-up Hokkien and Mandarin renderings of the names. The movie is in Hokkien, but the info outside the movie I could find was in Mandarin. The movie doesn’t say everyone’s name, so I had to go off what I could find.
The film has a ton of setup to get through, but once things get going, it’s pretty fun! It certainly contradicts Film History: An Introduction, which seems to believe that Taiwan only made propaganda and shlock before 1982.