When she picks up a ba gua (an eight trigram mirror used to deflect bad energy in Chinese geomancy or feng shui) left behind on a bus, and hangs it on her house, Joy Ramirez sees a dramatic change in her fortune. She achieves top sales in her company, wins competition prizes, and her husband Inton is promoted. But their middle-class family life in a new suburb begins to unravel even as their luck grows. People around Joy are killed according to their Chinese astrological sign - a security guard born in the year of the snake is bitten by a poisonous snake, the bakery woman born in the year of the rat is killed by a rat transmitted disease, and Joy discovers that the man who left the ba gua on the bus was born in the year of the rabbit and was run over by a Rabbit Bus liner. Joy gradually discovers the secret of her ancient ba gua mirror and its curse as the film moves inexorably to its shocking climactic end.
Known more recently for his action films (Spirit Warriors) and political drama (Dekada 70), direk Roño here turns in a well-constructed and genuinely chilling horror movie that fuses both contemporary Hollywood horror elements such as woman-in-jeopardy, visions of ghosts, the disruption of normalcy, with Asian "superstition" and beliefs. What elevates Feng Shui however is Roño’s command not only of technique but also aesthetic - that horror is made not so much by shock but by its expression of an inner morality. In Feng Shui, the narrative of horror reflects the dysfunction of the middle class family and its relations, and becomes a commentary on greed and materialism. Neil Daza’s elegant cinematography incorporates the moody, saturated colors essential to the horror genre with documentary sequences of everyday Manila to capture both the horror thrills and the underlying social commentary.