Anthony Wong has long been known as not only one of Hong Kong's most prolific actors, but somewhat of an odd egg as well. After all, this was the man who, after winning a Hong Kong Film Award, announced to the audience that he would be promptly be taking the award into the bathroom with him. So it should come as no surprise that his directorial debut New Tenant is a bit quirky to say the least.

The film centers around a writer played by Wong named Alan Tam (yes, the character's name was chosen on purpose) who has spent the last decade in a mental hospital. Upon leaving, he rents an apartment in an abandoned building which contains a clock that sends him back to 1984. The only person that can hear Alan during this time is one of the previous tenants, a young girl named Dolphin (played by Dolphin Chan). A strange romance soon develops between the two, and so when her sister Whale (Perrie Lai) begins dating a suspicious professor (Lawrence Ng), Alan helps Dolphin to find out the shocking truth about her sister's beau.

At some points drama, some others romance, some others dopey comedy, and with a liberal dose of ghost story thrown in, New Tenant (like Wong himself) is hard to categorize. In many ways, this film should have been destined to fail, and in fact, it only played for a week in theatres upon it's release. The movie obviously had no budget and looks cheap, the acting is uneven, and the story (even though there were three screenwriters working on it) has some huge plot holes. Most damningly, the ending comes off as more than a bit of a cop-out. I'm not going to directly ruin anything, but it definitely like Wong didn't know exactly how to finish the movie and went for the most convienient way out.

Despite the bad taste in the viewer's mouth that the ending leaves, Wong does manage to generate some genuinely creepy moments without having to resort to the splatter one might expect from the star of such movies as The Untold Story. And, at the end of the day, the characters actually come off as likeable, which draws the viewer into the movie. Even if their final fate isn't what most people might want or expect, the journey to get there makes New Tenant worth a viewing for fans of Hong Kong suspense movies. It's certainly better than many of the more recent entries in the genre coming from Hong Kong, which seem to mistake CGI or cute pop stars as a replacement for competent film-making.

RATING: 7