Biography of Meng Po (2024)

Unexpected Gem

Short summary:
Qing Heng is a dead soul trying to find his love who he's been searching for for a very long time. But dead souls are required to give up all their memories, so how can he fight the rules of heavens to find his beloved?

Saw this on iQiyi and decided to give it a try and was very pleasantly surprised. I spent most of the movie wondering how on earth they were going to resolve anything and surprisingly, it did! I've watched much longer full length dramas that managed a fraction of the plot resolution that this movie did. We find out major motivations of main characters and there are surprises along the way.

You might get less out of it if you're not familiar with Chinese mythology about Meng Po and reincarnation. An important point to know is that canonically, Meng Po is the lady who cooks up the soup of forgetfulness that one must drink before getting reincarnated.

It's the length of a movie so the main points are not overly complicated but I think the execution was very well done considering the constraints of telling a fairly involved story in 90 minutes. I thought the CGI was actually very well done for what I assumed was not a movie with a big budget. I recognize the female lead from a (passable but not great) low budget costume drama I've seen before and the ML seems to have been only in support roles so far. They both did a solid job acting. Some of the support cast didn't sell their roles anywhere near as well but it hardly mattered when they had so little screentime.

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