East meets West in homegrown biotech thriller

As a thriller/horror film set in Taipei, Double Vision (雙瞳) provides two good reasons for you to watch this first Hollywood-financed Taiwanese film.

It is probably the first Taiwanese film to look at this often-gray city with a wild sense of imagination. Secondly, the plot centers around a mysterious sect of Taoism that operates using hallucination and serial murder. It's a great reflection of this modern yet superstition-laden city.

For Taiwanese filmmaking, Chen Kuo-fu's fifth film is heartening.

As a slasher flick, it provides non-stop horrors guaranteed to give audiences the creeps. The corpse of a baby floats in a glass container filled with formalin (this baby has two pupils in each eye). One character has his heart removed while still alive, and another gets his tongue ripped out. And as an added bonus, Chen throws in plenty of interesting information about Taoist ritual and biotech. Chen describes his production as "a film with a typical Hollywood structure but with Taiwanese content."

Huang Hou-tu (Tony Leung Kar-fai) is a glum police officer who has been relegated to a do-nothing job in the foreign affairs police after having caught his colleague in a corruption scandal. His daughter was later kidnapped by the convicted colleague and in the course of the abduction she was injured and has since suffered from trauma. Huang has been guilt-ridden ever since.

During a hot summer, three murders have taken place within a week. The head of a chemical industry group is found dead in his office. His body is cold as if he had been drowned in ice water, though he apparently never left his office. A legislator's mistress, who had been involved in several corruption scandals, is found murdered in her apartment. Her body has been burnt, though there is no sign of fire in her house. A few days later an American priest named Lorenzo, who was reportedly involved in arms deals between the US and Taiwan, is found dead in his church. He had been disemboweled and his intestines were washed and put back into his body.

The three were unacquainted, but the coroner discovers a mysterious black fungus in their brains, along with evidence that they had all died in a hallucinatory state.

Because of the mysterious nature of the murders and the confidential background of Lorenzo, the Americans send FBI agent Kevin Richter (David Morse) to help investigate. He teams up with the morose foreign affairs police detective Huang. The investigation runs into trouble straight away. First it is the cultural difference between the officers, then opposition from the Taiwanese vice squad who are worried that Richter will take all the credit.

As Richter and Huang dig deeper, they discover the murders have been carried out by hi-tech experts turned religious fanatics who have built a temple complex within their modern skyscraper.

Richter and Huang had no idea what they were getting into.

Being a film financed and co-produced by Hong Kong-based Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia, with a budget of reportedly US$60m, Double Vision indeed evinces Hollywood production values.

The cinematography provides a very real, and very detailed picture of the city and people, giving the story a cruel and surreal atmosphere. The special effects throughout the film are top-notch. Director Chen Kuo-fu, better known for his witty sarcasm and laments over the state of urban human relationships seems to have changed his style entirely.