User reviews

I stumbled upon the 2015 Cantonese horror movie "Are You Here" (aka "Dip sin dip sin") in 2019. Needless to say, that with my love for the Hong Kong cinema I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch this movie. And the fact that it was a horror movie, made it all the more appealing.

However, "Are You Here" turned out to be a bland and less than mediocre movie actually. Why? Well, first of all the story was way too mainlined and uneventful actually. It felt like director Jill Wong was running on autopilot, because there was very little of anything scary or truly outstanding to be experienced throughout the course of the movie. Or perhaps it was because of a subpar story written by Patrick Kong.

It was nice, however, to see a movie with nothing but almost entirely unfamiliar faces in the cast ensemble. There were two familiar faces here, those belong to veteran actresses Lan Law and Susan Yam-Yam Shaw. I will say that the acting in the movie was actually fair, but it was severely hindered by the script and storyline.

"Are You Here" was just way too generic and it was frightfully devoid of anything even remotely scary. So that was definitely working against the overall enjoyment of the movie.

Hong Kong movie that's missing a lot of beats for the western audiences since it has cultural influence that is vastly different from our own and, therefore, don't hold the same weight. To underscore this, the North American distribution company renamed it Ouija 4, hence it having nothing to do with the first two.

That being said, it wasn't horrible, would I watch it again? No. Would I recommend it seriously? Also no. But you could do worse for a lazy afternoon viewing.

The version I watched was dubbed, really badly dubbed, and the plot was total nonsense with a LOT of holes here and there. It's barely cohesive, like being crammed inside a jar and shaken wildly before being haphazardly dumped into the blinding sun.

There's obviously bits that are lost in translation, and as mentioned before, a lot of the story impacts aren't as meaningful because of the cultural divide.

Not for anyone serious, just turn your brain off and have a good giggle at the oddities.