JiaJia is a famous celebrity who`s fallen in love, and is shacking up with her Japanese beau in his quaint, family-run spring hotel. When close friend and confidante Wei Ling (Christy Chung) receives a series of sinister SMSes from Jia Jia (Lui Yan), she decides to investigate the whereabouts of her celebrity pal, who has mysteriously gone missing.
The Incredible Truth has a pretty conventional premise as thrillers go, although director Leong Tak Sam tries to spice things up with some ambiguous hauntings (ghost, or murderer with mysterious alibi?). Unfortunately, that translates to a metric ton of cheap jump scares, in a feeble attempt to add a pulse to the movie`s innately tedious plot. While jump scares are par for the course in these genres, they`re so haphazardly placed in The Incredible Truth that they`re more likely to evoke sniggers than screams.
The central flaw of The Incredible Truth lies in its weak characters, which range from the forgettable to the unlovable. That`s not to diss the cast members- who put in generally valiant efforts – but when your story centers on a spineless young hotel owner, a scheming older matriarch and a heroine whose only discerning quality is the shrillness of her screaming, the meandering way in which the plot twists unfold is more likely to annoy than tantalize.
To add insult to injury, Wei Ling, the film`s primary character, is supposedly gifted with a sixth sense, which feels suspiciously like a convenient way to excuse all those ill-advised plot twists. You`d think that a plot device like this would at least yield a more energetic pace, but sadly, the characters spending an excessive amount of time staring pensively into space, like robots who`ve encountered a fatal error in their central processing systems.
By the time the last act rolls around and the murderer`s identity is finally unveiled, audiences will probably be too apathetic to even laugh at how ludicrously tacked-on the plot twist feels. A good plot twists deepens the complexity of a movie, and makes us want to watch it again to mull over the detailsâ€