Director – Aozaru Shiao, Screenplay – Benjamin Lin, Aozaru Shiao & Tzu Yung Hung, Story – Tzu Yung Hung, Producers – Benjamin Lin, Photography – Jimmy Yu, Visual Effects Supervisors – Kuo Chou Hsu & Ming Xing Dong, Visual Effects – Global Moly (Beijing) Pictures Technology Co., Ltd. (Supervisor – Hui Ji) & L@pcc, Special Effects – Bruce Movie Special Effects CO., Ltd., Makeup Effects – Meta SFX Makeup Studio, Production Design – Y.C. Kuo. Production Company – Calfilms Asia.
Cast
Tony Yo-ming Yang (Hsu Mingzhe), Sandrine Pinna (Dr Zhen Yi Ling), Frederick Lee (Officer Wang Zhicheng), Liu Hsiu Fu (Lin Ziping), Yi-wen Chen (Liao Zhi Huei), Gingle Wan (Wang Ting)
Plot
Following a bus crash, the bus’s driver Hsu Mingzhe is brought out of a coma. The four others aboard the bus have all been killed or left in comas. Due to advanced neurosurgical techniques devised by Dr Zhen Yi Ling, the personality of Hsu Mingzhe and the other four passengers have been implanted inside the body of a condemned criminal. One of the passengers on the bus was a serial killer who abducts children who have deformities and cuts the damaged parts out of them. The killer has abducted a senator’s son and they need to find the son’s whereabouts before it is too late. Hsu Mingzhe is able to view the memories of the others passengers. Dr Zhen offers Hsu ownership of the prisoner’s body if he can lead them to the missing child. However, the killer then wakens inside the body, takes over and breaks out of the facility with Dr Zhen as hostage.
Plurality was the fourth film for Taiwanese director Aozaru Shiao who had previously made the superhero film Brotherhood of Legion (2007) and the non-genre comedy Forever Love (2013), plus co-directed Dream Flight (2014).
The film comes with a fascinating premise – four personalities have been implanted inside a man’s body in an effort to find the whereabouts of a missing child, where one of the personalities is a serial killer but it is not known which one. Most people reviewing the film reached for comparisons to a Split Personality film like Split (2017) but that only reveals the limitedness of their grounding in cinematic history.
What Plurality feels like is more a 1990s film like Virtuosity (1995) and Replicant (2001), which had serial killers respectively incarnated in nanotech android or clone bodies. That maybe and something like Identity (2003), albeit with its twist ending known at the outset, or perhaps even more so Heart & Souls (1993) with its multiple souls inhabiting Robert Downey Jr’s body, along with more than a few dashes of Source Code (2011) where Jake Gyllenhaal had to keep inhabiting the body of another on a train trip before a bomb went off.
Tony Yo-ming Yang faces multiple personalities within himself
It took me quite a long time to engage with Plurality. The central premise was not difficult to follow but the flips between personalities sometimes had you lost as to who was inhabiting the body at any one time. There was far too much running around the institute in the early scenes where it felt that Aozaru Shiao had borrowed his lighting schemes from Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010). Nevertheless, when the action gets out into the outside world, the film started to reveal its strengths.
The early scenes are a fairly straightforward progression plotwise but in this later half, the plot contorts around on itself with considerable dexterity, producing a number of twists. Tony Yo-ming Yang gives a fairly good performance – there are not the big flashy acting pyrotechnics of James McAvoy in Split but he does a good job of delineating the character transformations.
