Romantic comedies are always searching for new narrative gimmicks that make the coupling of its main pair feel worth making a movie about. Visible Secret (2001), Ann Hui’s first non-period piece in a while, announces how it’s going to set itself apart from its genre peers right away: it opens with the beheading of a man who is pushed, maybe accidentally or maybe not, into some traffic. 

Visible Secret is a playful movie, something suggested straightaway both by how the victim’s headless body continues boogying around when it shouldn’t and how the scene technically serves as a meet-cute for its main characters. The film jumps ahead years into the future, when two of the kids who’d witnessed the death are in their 20s. They meet again at a club. Peter (Eason Chan) is trying to soothe the stresses of his day job — he’s an ungifted hairdresser with a talent for accidentally sniping ears and turning all requested styles into bowl cuts — and June (Shu Qi) is with a boyfriend she cares so little about that when she locks eyes with Peter, she quickly decides to ditch the man she came with.

June is something of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl type, quick to force Peter out of his shell (she leads him to a karaoke bar right off the bat) and with a look-at-me personal style that might move her to wear eyepatches, rainbow-knitted statement hats, and thick smears of black eyeshadow and cherry-brown lipstick. We don’t mind too much, though, because Qi’s performance is so charmingly unpredictable and because screenwriter Abe Kwong suggests from the beginning that June has waltzed into Peter’s life for potentially shady reasons that make her unknowability more intentionally mysterious than a byproduct of tiresome male projection. June quickly confirms some of our suspicions. She admits, once she’s gotten to know Peter better, that the reason she often dons sunglasses at night is to better hide the sights of ghosts, which she’s resolute about being able to see through her left eye whether she’d like to or not.

Abetted by Arthur Wong’s evocatively misty cinematography, Hui aesthetically leans into the spookiness of that reveal. The air of Visible Secret’s Hong Kong setting is usually choked with fog — something that looks more ominous at night, when the full moon gives it a whitish glow — and characters can’t seem to avoid moving through nerve-wrackingly empty alleyways and parks. There’s a recurring image of a stoic woman in phantasmic white makeup, who always seems to be there when Peter rides the subway. June tells Peter that she thinks a spectral someone is following him, but her trustworthiness is made shaky by a rumor that she was one of the last people to see Peter’s fragile-healthed father and a mid-film sighting of her embracing someone who might be up to no good.

This all might make Visible Secret sound like a horror movie. But Hui’s approach is too laid back, too fundamentally lighthearted, to properly feel like one. For most of the film, its supernatural leanings feel akin to mood lighting. Hui seems happiest reveling in a new relationship’s simple pleasures, lingering on Peter and June talking mindlessly in bed about birthmarks and tattoos and or a breezy day in the park spent flying kites. What romance isn’t slightly — though in Peter and June’s case, very — haunted by the past and other unwanted intruders? Visible Secret is so appealing because it doesn’t treat its horror angle sensationally: it has an it-is-what-it-is quality that makes Peter and June’s romance feel extra special. The ghosts trying to interfere are rendered, albeit not forever, mostly as another nuisance in a life already full of them, and the love being worked for as something close to a miracle.