Haunted Office (2002) – A Movie A Day 2021 #41
Haunted Office (2002) – A Movie A Day 2021 #41
For today’s movie, I wanted to pick something with one of my favorite actors of all time, Shu Qi. I became a huge fan of Shu Qi’s back around the year 2000 when I saw her in the movie Gorgeous. After watching her steal scenes from one of my favorites of all time, Jackie Chan, I had to see more. So, I imported and watched a bunch of her movies on DVD, and I’ve been a superfan ever since. There are still lots of her movies I haven’t seen yet though. She’s been in tons of stuff, and finding her movies in the United States can be difficult and pricey in a lot of situations, but I’ve been trying to slowly see everything Shu Qi has done. Some of her movies are easier to track down than others, and today’s movie of the day is one that wasn’t too difficult to find. Plus, it gets bonus points for co-starring Karen Mok, another great actor I discovered while I was collecting a bunch of Hong Kong DVDs nearly two decades ago. Today’s movie is Haunted Office, a Hong King supernatural horror movie that is fairly light on scares but has a nice twist at the end.
Haunted Office feels like an anthology movie even though the stories do sort of overlap in places. Effectively though, the movie is made up of three separate short stories that all happen to take place in the same office building. The first story stars Karen Mok as Pat, an office worker who encounters some ghostly happenings centered around the bathroom on the floor her office is on. The second story stars Jordan Chan as Richard, a young and spoiled head of a small business who connives to get a nice old lady to quit so he doesn’t have to pay her pension. And the third story features Shu Qi as Shan, an office worker haunted by a female ghost, and Stephen Fung as Ken, Shan’s new fellow employee who tries to help her out. All three stories are simple and fun ghost stories with little twists at the end. Then at the very end of the movie, all three stories are brought together for one big final twist. They’re all enjoyable, but I don’t want to say any more than that about the plots for fear of ruining any surprises if you happen to watch the movie.
Shu Qi’s story was my favorite, then Karen Mok’s, then Jordan Chan’s. Jordan’s Chan’s story was basically a comedy while the other two were more serious, so there’s good variety in the film. I didn’t realize Haunted Office is basically an anthology movie until I got well into it, so the pacing seemed really odd at first. We see Shu Qi and Stephen Fung in one of the first scenes with Karen Mok, but then we follow Karen Mok and don’t see the other two until over halfway through the movie. Jordan Chan’s story acts as kind of a bridge in the middle, but really, there’s no meaningful crossover until the final couple of minutes of the movie. It works fine, I just wasn’t expecting it at first.
That’s really all I have to say about Haunted Office right now. It’s light and fun, and there’s just enough going on in the background that you can probably start piecing together some of the mystery that is revealed later on in the movie. I give it a recommendation for fans of Hong Kong horror that doesn’t take itself too seriously.