Fiona Xie's Rule #1 Movie - more updates

Also Known As: Rule #1 (Singapore: English title)
Parents Guide: Add content advisory for parents
Country: Singapore / Hong Kong
Language: Mandarin / Cantonese
Certification: Singapore:NC-16
Filming Locations: Hong Kong, China

Budgeted at S$3.2 million, Rule #1 is a supernatural thriller about a young cop, Sgt Lee (Shawn Yue) who has a near-fatal encounter with a vicious serial killer, during which he is convinced that he witnessed a ghostly occurrence. He places that in his incident report which causes his transfer to the mysterious Miscellaneous Affairs Department (MAD).

MAD is a two-man special police unit that handles supernatural cases. Inspector Wong (Ekin Cheng) is the boss who tells Lee that the number one rule to remember is that there is no ghost in this world. As time goes by, Shawn Yue notices that most of their cases seem to be genuine hauntings, and that Ekin Cheng seems to be hiding the facts of the existence of ghosts. A series of suicides begin, and as Shawn Yue delves deeper, he begins to retreat further into himself, neglecting his home and girlfriend (Fiona Xie).

Rule #1 starts off very interestingly, with a long, drawn-out but very intense sequence in a car park. However, in the midst of the movie, the story takes a turn that requires a huge suspension of disbelief by the audience. But if you're willing to go along for the ride, the film can be somewhat rewarding. There are some great ideas, like the truly creepy screaming swimming pool. But it's the characters and the occasional effective humour that are really the winning points of the film, as the scares are pretty much standard fare (long hair, sudden loud jolts, etc). While the entire story rests on the theme of assumptions and that what you see and hear is not always the truth; it also basically revolves around men who are having women problems. What Kelvin Tong presents is a very dark, very bleak, very depressing men's world, where sometimes the most sincere effort to connect can prove disastrous. At times, the film might be regarded as somewhat morally confused, but the big twist at the end justifies much of what went before.