The setting is southern China. Two couples of young students arrive in a village to watch the traditional ceremonies of the Kuyi tribe, and they go to the typical courtyard house belonging to family friends of one of the group to ask for a bed for the night. The door is opened by a man (played by Simon Yam) who says he is a distant relative of the owners who are away for a while. A bad omen strikes the youngsters when they see the man, of gloomy, mysterious and disturbing appearance, but not knowing the area and having no other place to go, they decide to stay there for the night, sleeping in the rear wing of the house.
During the night the man gets the chance to get one of the youngsters to one side and he enthrals him with the offer of an ancient tribal crown; when he puts it on, he is paralysed by a nail going into the base of his skull. The next day, he does the same to the young man’s girlfriend, before telling the surviving couple that the two youngsters that have disappeared left first thing in the morning to visit the village. He then tells the surviving girl that he knew her parents well, many years earlier. The girl’s boyfriend, suspicious of the unconvincing explanations given by the man and the disappearance of his friends, hears the cell phone of one of the friends ringing inside a huge wine vat found in the courtyard; he confronts the man, thereby unleashing a homicidal rage…
Suddenly, the action shifts to the village tavern and the narration begins to go back in time, with the arrival in the village of a governmental agent sent to the village to investigate a possible tax fraud. The agent suspects that the owner of the house with the courtyard, to whom it regularly pays out a pension, is in actual fact dead…
The destinies of the investigator and the mysterious man are intertwined in the tavern, which is run by a bored, restless young wife (played by Zhang Jingchu). Little by little the mystery is unravelled and the film is transformed from a potential horror film into a psychological thriller, brought to life by diverse characters who tell of their existential choices, of wounded honour and vendetta. The film’s climax is a long conversation/confession in the tavern between the two men, interrupted by the sequence — unexpected and almost hypnotic — of an improvised tango between the bored young bar-owner and the cynical, sensual young investigator.
The film manages to avoid the clichés of the horror genre and to maintain consistent psychological tension via twists in the tale justified by the emotional development of the characters, rather than by the narrative itself, concluding with an unpredictable finale which, thanks to the interpretive skills of Simon Yam in the role of an obsessive, tormented man, acquires an equally complicated credibility.
The director, Fei Xing, who after having worked for years in television has debuted in cinema with this film, declared: “The Man Behind the Courtyard House will be my first step towards the world cinema stage. In the future, I want to make action films like Speed and thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs… Many directors want to be the new Akira Kurosawa or Antonioni, but I want to be the Spielberg of Asia.”
Maria Ruggieri