Bunshinsaba 2012

Xiao Ai, Mei Ting, is a struggling novelist whose horror manuscript has just been rejected by her publisher. When the publisher informs her that her husband, Qi Kun, Wu Chao, who was imprisoned on charges of domestic abuse, has been released, she decides to pack up and move with her asthmatic son, Xiao Xin, Zhu Jiangdi, to a remote mansion owned by her friend and Xiao Xin’s doctor, Yinan, Guo Jingfei. The new surroundings bring a tense quiet to their lives as they settle into the old house, where every creak seems to carry a memory and every shadow hints at a hidden past.

In the mansion, Xiao Ai discovers cut-out photos of a girl and her mother tucked away inside a wardrobe, and Xiao Xin finds a rag doll lying outside with a curious fondness for it. From the moment the doll appears, a chilling sense of a presence lingers, and the girl associated with the doll begins to terrorize Xiao Ai, while Xiao Xin behaves oddly, insisting that the girl is afraid of her abusive mother. The mood grows increasingly uneasy as Xiao Ai tries to write, only to find a story forming on her laptop that updates day after day, mirroring the tale Xiao Xin narrates: a girl who is harmed by her mother after her father leaves. The convergence of the supernatural with the personal history of the family deepens the sense of dread, as if the mansion itself is whispering secrets that refuse to stay buried.

Despite numerous attempts to dispose of the doll, it stubbornly reappears and returns to Xiao Xin’s possession, as if drawn by an unseen thread. The hauntings escalate from eerie to violent, and Xiao Ai’s paranoia grows alongside Xiao Xin’s insistence that the girl and her mother exist in some form. When Xiao Xin goes missing, Yinan calls in authorities to search the mansion, and Xiao Ai learns that the previous occupants were a girl and her mother who once lived there— the mother killed her daughter and then herself when a husband left. Rumors circulate that the girl survived and was taken to an orphanage, a detail that unsettles Xiao Ai even further as she faces the mystery of her own past.

Qi Kun arrives at the mansion in a bid to uncover Xiao Ai’s whereabouts, revealing that he has researched her background and learned she was raised in an orphanage and diagnosed with amnesia and asthma. A car crash on the way to the hospital injures Xiao Ai, and she is brought back to the mansion by Yinan and Qi Kun, who vow to protect her while the search for Xiao Xin continues. The drive back exposes more of the tangled history, and Xiao Ai presses on toward the truth she has avoided for so long.

Back at the mansion, Xiao Ai uncovers Qi Kun’s research documents, and a devastating truth emerges: the girl who haunts her is, in fact, a younger version of herself, and it is she who had harmed Xiao Xin in childhood—a consequence of her own mother’s abuse. The amnesia that clouded her memory had misled her to pin the blame on Qi Kun, a man who only ever wanted to protect his son. The revelation forces a confrontation with her past; she recognizes that she unknowingly wrote the self-updating story on her laptop because the memories were fractured and resurfacing. She is drawn to a secret room behind the wardrobe where her mother hanged herself years ago, and her younger self guides her to stay long enough to locate Xiao Xin. After saving him, she attempts to escape, but the mother’s spirit nearly suffocates her until she finally calls her mother “mother” for the first time, a moment that breaks the cycle and makes the haunting recede.

Months pass, and Xiao Ai remains in the mansion, choosing to build a life there. She delivers a quiet monologue about how her mother and son taught her to understand and forgive—an understanding that allows her to forgive herself as well. In a final, haunting image, a younger Xiao Ai walks toward the wardrobe, where she is again drawn into the room by an unseen force, hinting that the past may still reach forward to claim her, even as she tries to move forward.