Super Me Parent Guide

Sang Yu (Talu Wang) is learning the hard way that writing is not a quick route to enormous wealth or fame. Without a finished script to turn in to his employer, San Ge (Cao Bingkun), he finds himself evicted from his trashy apartment and scrambling to find food. Worse, every time he falls asleep, he is brutally murdered by a demon in his dreams. However, once he learns he can wake himself up, Sang Yu also finds that he can bring things back from his dreams…very valuable things. With so much wealth, Sang Yu has all kinds of options he never had before, including pursuing a relationship with the cute barista, Hua Er (Song Jia), who works the coffee shop across the street. But even in dreams, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone free money, and Sang Yu soon finds that the required price might be more than he can afford to pay.

In fairness to Super Me, I might have just missed something. I woke up early to watch the movie and my brain was accordingly soupy, but with the help of a considerable volume of caffeine, I managed to be more or less alert throughout. Maybe I was too tired to follow the story…but I don’t think so.

The film’s biggest problem is that the plot just doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s clearly trying to play around with dreams and reality, shifting the audience between the two and making some broad psychological claims about the nature of each. And credit where credit is due, I’ve never seen a movie quite like this one. The story is fairly unique, but it’s also incomprehensible. The ending is suitably dramatic, but when you can’t figure out what it’s supposed to mean, it loses much of its impact. Now, it’s possible that there are subtle cultural undercurrents in the movie that are obvious to anyone who understands Chinese culture. In that case, my confusion is a result of my North American world view, but again, I don’t think so.

Also dragging the film down is the flat romantic subplot. For all the time the story invests in Sang Yu and Hua Er, there’s no chemistry between the two of them. At best, our hero comes off as a weird stalker, and Hua Er has so little emotion or character that she could be easily replaced with your average houseplant. So, while this movie is broadly suitable for teenagers, it’s also not nearly interesting enough to be worth watching. Unless you just really like being vaguely confused while speed-reading rapid fire subtitles (technically optional if you speak fluent Mandarin), this is probably a title you’re going to want to skip.