Tales from the Dark 1 2013

Kwan is an odd-job worker who lives in a cramped, coffin-like home and has just lost his job as a restaurant assistant. Desperation pushes him toward the shadows of the city: at night he starts breaking into a columbarium, snatching funerary urns, and leaving ransom notes for the grieving families to contact him and reclaim what he’s taken. In a chilling turn, one of his conquests—the cousin of a supposed victim—turns out to be interacting with the ghost of that victim itself. The money he pockets from these ransom exchanges later appears as grotesque hell banknotes, a detail that unsettles him further. When he tries to burn the banknotes, the flames spiral out of control and he ends up burning himself to death, a grim tableau that foreshadows the story’s mingling of the living world with restless spirits.

Ho, a fortune-teller who can see ghosts, is preparing to retire to spend more time with his wife and his son. His last assignments involve Cheung, a swimming coach, and Cheung’s pregnant wife, who insists that she is being haunted by a malevolent presence. To uncover the truth, Ho teams up with his neighbor Lan, a crystal seller and fellow fortune-teller, to untangle a web of sorrow, deceit, and spectral interference. The investigation uncovers a painful history: Cheung had an affair with his student, Chan Siu-Ting, and made her pregnant. When Cheung spurned her, Chan drowned herself at sea and returned as a vengeful ghost. Ho and Lan work to calm Chan’s anger, urging the ghost to release her thirst for revenge and to seek peace in the afterlife. Along the way, Ho discovers a personal legacy—his own son has inherited his ability to perceive the unseen, a revelation that deepens the emotional stakes of their unfolding story.

Meanwhile, Chu operates as a “villain-hitter,” a ritual performer who chants curses and uses paper effigies to target the names, belongings, and lives of her clients’ chosen enemies. Her clientele ranges from a wealthy woman with a grievance against her daughter-in-law to another man with a name that oddly echoes the Hong Kong Chief Executive. Her final customer is a young woman who asks for three men and a woman to be cursed, and she intends to execute the hitting herself. As Chu accepts the commission, she slowly realizes she herself is the ghost of a woman who was raped and murdered by three men, among whom Chu’s own son is implicated. Chu witnesses the kidnapping of the woman by her son and his partners, yet she does nothing to stop it. The story’s tension peaks as the hitting intensifies, drawing a brutal line between crime, guilt, and supernatural consequence. In the end, the fates of Chu and the others collide in a dramatic, consequential conclusion that binds the living and the dead in a shared, unsettling closure.