Julian Lee was a noted art photographer in Hong Kong, as well as a visual artist and author. He also directed two feature films: The Accident in 1999 and Night Corridor in 2003. The latter was inspired by one of his own novels. It is a thorny, difficult piece.

Daniel Wu plays Sam, a Chinese photographer living in London who learns of the death of his twin brother Hung back in Hong Kong. When Sam returns home for the first time in years, it is to a deepening mystery about the circumstances of his brother’s demise.

It is not a surprise for a multi-talented artist to approach making a horror film not only with a fine art sensibility, but with a strong sense of the abstract. In this case Night Corridor is dominated by the Heinrich Fuseli painting The Nightmare: it appears in the film, is repeatedly referenced and discussed, and seems to have provided the majority of Lee’s inspirations. At first Sam struggles to reintegrate with an alcoholic mother (Wai Ying-hung) and the family’s dubious priest (Eddy Ko). Then, after connecting with a mysterious librarian and learning more facts about Hung’s death, events get progressively more uncertain and paranoid. Did Hung die in an accident or was it murder? Does it have something to do with Father Chan, revealed to have sexually abused Sam as a child? Is Sam who he thinks he is? Is he, in fact, actually Hung? It all gets very twisted and confusing, and the addition of supernatural elements are the extra helping that over-eggs the pudding.

There is strong material here, and Daniel Wu is an excellent actor who does his very best, but Lee simply fails to separate good ideas from bad and struggles to pull a coherent, artful picture out of a mess of directions. Elements of queer cinema are compromised by inadvisable links to Catholic sexual abuse. What decent performances there are get compromised by amateurish ones. Night Corridor is remarkably short, running just 72 minutes, and it is overstuffed to the point of incoherence. It was shot on a shoestring budget over just 13 days, and to be honest it shows.

One can see through the material that Lee was a genuine artist, and that there was thought and motive behind what he assembled. One can also see that despite a superb visual eye and some provocative ideas, Lee simply was not a filmmaker. Scenes do not gel together. Important information is either skipped altogether, or related in an oblique or rushed manner so as to feel meaningless. The sexual content feels transgressive, but unjustified.

Night Corridor is effectively unapproachable as cinema, particularly as a horror film. It is best considered perhaps as an insight into Julian Lee himself: a creative artist and gay man, sifting through his thoughts and concerns on the screen. As a conventional feature film, Night Corridor is terribly weak. As art, even if not particularly good, it retains the capacity to fascinate.