Always Be with You 2017

David, a taxi driver with lung cancer, Julian Cheung kills vacation property owner Patrick in a freak car accident. Off-duty police officer Sam, Louis Koo, his wife Si, and Sam’s aunt seem to narrowly escape the collision after Sam’s aunt warns him to drive away from the road they are on. Simultaneously, Siu-hung, who has just broken off her fiancé, commits suicide by leaping from a building, the impact resonating with Patrick’s fate as her body lands on top of his car. The film sets a tone of interconnected tragedy where the living and the dead share a disturbing space, and every decision echoes in unexpected, haunting ways.

Chi-keung, a crematorium worker crushed by mounting gambling debts, attempts to steady his life by theft, stealing a pair of valuable gold bracelets—the funerary objects of Siu-hung—to pay off his mounting obligations. He fails to offload the bracelets when the buyer is crushed by a concrete block in transit. Later, while crossing a street, a lorry veers off course and strikes Chi-keung along with a couple who are Siu-hung’s younger sister and brother-in-law. Chi-keung and Siu-hung’s sister survive the crash, and the bracelets slip loose during his unconsciousness, only to be retrieved by the police as crucial evidence. The combination of debt, theft, and a brush with death threads Chi-keung’s fate tightly to the more mysterious happenings surrounding Patrick and Siu-hung’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, Patrick’s fiancée, Yu Xin, after weathering the initial shock, hopes to fulfill Patrick’s last wish by running a suburban vacation house. Yet the new venture is haunted by a series of unsettling events. The first tenants, a loving young couple, die by suicide during their stay, and Sam accompanies Si to the scene, where they sense the presence of a disfigured female spirit. Later, David appears at the vacation home offering help to Yu Xin; she initially declines, but after a time, she accepts him as a long-term tenant. The house becomes a locus of spectral activity, turning Patrick’s dream into a corridor of echoes and unanswered questions.

Back home, Chi-keung is tormented by Siu-hung’s ghost while loan sharks circle his life, pressing him with threats and the weight of his debts. He escapes through a window and ends up at Yu Xin’s vacation home, where despair drives him toward a self-destructive act via gas. David discovers him and later informs Yu Xin that Chi-keung is gone, a truth complicated by Chi-keung’s belongings disappearing from the room. The next morning, Yu Xin grows anxious about Chi-keung’s absence and fears another suicide. Accompanied by David, she enters Chi-keung’s rented room only to find it empty and his belongings gone.

As days pass, a portion of Chi-keung’s dismembered body is discovered, and Sam and Si return to Yu Xin’s property to question David and Yu Xin about Chi-keung’s fate. David and Yu Xin deny ever having met him; that night, Sam sees Chi-keung’s ghost, and it becomes clear that David disposed of Chi-keung’s body but did not burn it as Chi-keung’s final note had requested. In a shocking turn, David surrenders to the police and then takes his own life in his cell, leaving behind a note to Yu Xin that explains his terminal illness and his symbolic, final act of self-destruction.

The mystery deepens when Sam discovers singer Jamie’s vinyl, a gift from Jamie to her uncle that Si had found at a second-hand shop, and the vinyl appears haunted in Sam and Si’s apartment. They eventually decide to return it to the shop owner—Jamie’s uncle—relinquishing the haunted object and the personal history tied to it. The cycle of haunting and revelation continues as the couple confronts the toll these spirits take on their relationship and their understanding of the living world’s boundaries.

In the quiet moments that punctuate the night, Sam questions Si about what she would do if he were to leave her, a question that unsettles Si due to the strange change in Sam’s behavior since the night of the accident. Their bond tightens in fear and love as Sam’s warning about the unseen intensifies. Then, as two men approach, Sam breaks from Si’s embrace and runs, while Si gives chase and trains her gun on the men, dragging Sam away by his arms. The truth unfolds: Sam reveals that he has been dead for three weeks since the night of the crash—the living world has blurred into the other side for him.

That night, after avoiding the collision, the sequence of events reveals the fateful crash from a different vantage point. A passing car—the second-hand shop owner, his wife, and Jamie—witnesses the moment Jamie leans out to capture the accident; Jamie is struck by a lorry from the opposite direction. Jamie’s torso is ripped away in the impact, and Sam’s skull is pierced by a long, upright nail, ending the living man’s life. In the final, quiet moment, the film locates the boundary between life and death, memory and loss, and the way one fatal event returns through the echoes of the past to shape the present in a landscape where the dead linger just beyond sight.