Rigor Mortis 2014

In this atmospheric supernatural drama, a once-celebrated actor named Chin Siu-ho spirals into despair after his wife and young son leave him. He moves into a dilapidated apartment building, where loneliness and sorrow weigh heavily on his shoulders. In a desperate moment, he hangs himself, and his struggles draw the attention of two twin girl ghosts who haunt the same apartment. These restless spirits eventually seize Chin’s body, plunging him into a terrifying battle for control.

A neighbor named Yau bursts into the room, slices the noose, and drives the vengeful spirits from Chin’s body. Later, Chin visits Yau’s restaurant, where Yau explains that his family are jiangshi hunters—vampire slayers—though he has grown weary and turned to cooking glutinous rice, a staple used against vampires. This small reveal adds a quiet, human texture to the world of the living and the dead that surrounds them.

Elsewhere in the building, an elderly man, Uncle Tung, falls down a stairwell and dies. His wife Meiyi seeks the help of Gau, a black magician living in the same building, to resurrect Tung. Gau performs a ritual on Tung’s disfigured corpse and predicts that Tung will revive in a few days, though he warns Meiyi to keep the warding mask on Tung’s face and not to remove it.

Chin meets Yang Feng, a traumatized single mother, and her son Pak. Through conversations with the building’s security guard, Uncle Yin, Chin learns that Yang and Pak once lived in the same unit and that the twin ghosts haunting the building were part of a tragic history: Yang’s husband had raped one twin, the other twin stabbed him, and the surviving twin hanged herself. These revelations explain why Yang fled the apartment, and Chin resolves to banish the ghosts so that Yang and Pak can move in with him.

When Yau declines to help, Chin is ambushed by Gau, who performs a ritual that summons the twins. The twins possess Chin again and attack Gau, but Yau arrives to assist. Together, Gau and Yau exorcise the ghosts from Chin and seal them in a cabinet. Yau instructs Gau to burn the cabinet, but Gau deceives him and secretly keeps the cursed container.

Meiyi grows frustrated with Tung’s ongoing non-resurrection and presses Gau for more help. Gau admits that virgin blood might speed up the process. Meanwhile, Uncle Yin investigates Tung’s disappearance and becomes suspicious of Gau’s knowledge of black magic. When Yin questions Gau, Meiyi strikes him dead with a pot, cutting short the inquiry.

Later, young Pak visits Meiyi alone. Meiyi, momentarily indecisive, locks Pak in the bathroom with Tung’s monstrous corpse. Against Gau’s warnings, Meiyi removes the warding mask from Tung’s face. Tung revives and brutally murders Pak, a horror that Meiyi can only watch with tears streaming down her face.

A powerful vampire-hunting artifact on Yau’s wall reacts, and Yau rushes to Gau’s apartment, finding Gau mortally wounded after being savagely attacked by the revived Tung. Gau confesses that Tung has risen as a jiangshi and will haunt the apartment complex. He also reveals that he himself caused Tung’s original death, having flung him over the rails when Tung survived the fall. Gau, who is terminally ill, had planned to bind the twin ghosts’ souls into Tung’s soulless body to gain power and extend his life. By removing Tung’s mask, Meiyi unintentionally unleashed the jiangshi’s rampage. Yau warns Chin and hurries to find Yang.

Yang, desperately searching for Pak, unwittingly opens the cabinet containing the twin ghosts. The twins slip free, and Yang discovers that Pak is now a ghost himself. She turns to destroy the jiangshi with a makeshift mace, but she is outmatched and killed. Chin arrives moments later and scorches the jiangshi with a Molotov cocktail. The shop of rice nearby spills in the struggle, temporarily immobilizing the creature, but then the twins seize Tung’s corpse and revive the jiangshi’s terrible power. They impale Chin with a long pole, leaving him gravely wounded.

Crucially, Chin, though badly injured, is found by Yau, who uses a spell to staunch the bleeding. Chin insists on helping, and Yau warns that he will die soon. They set a trap using vampire-hunting tools to bind Tung to the neighborhood, allowing Chin to confront the jiangshi. Yau weakens Tung with his tools, but the trap expires before Chin can secure a victory. With dawn approaching, Yau drags both Chin and Tung out of a window into the courtyard. Sunlight burns the vampire, forcing the twin spirits from Tung’s body. Tung collapses into ash, and Meiyi, in a moment of despair, slits her own throat. Chin and Yau collapse from exhaustion.

In the film’s final sequence, a startling twist is revealed: Chin did not survive the night. The events were the product of his dying mind as rigor mortis approached. In reality, the people he encountered—Yang and Pak as neighbors, Meiyi as a widow looking at a photo of Tung, and Yau rushing in too late—are simply residents he passed on the way to his apartment. At the morgue, Chin’s adult son identifies the body for the medical examiner, Dr. Gau, closing a circle that blurs the line between life, death, and memory. The film leaves a haunting impression of how grief can shape a nightmarish reality, and how the boundary between illusion and truth can be almost as dangerous as the supernatural forces it imitates.