City of Masks arrives with a premise that sounds like it should work: flip the Phantom of the Opera template, put a woman in the mask, and let her be the wronged genius haunting a theatre built on her death. The bones of a genuinely interesting horror-romance are here. They just never assemble into a skeleton. The casting collision is the film's central problem and its only real spark. Amanda Jiang plays Eve — the dead composer, the ghost, the phantom — as though she wandered in from a David Lynch production, all sensual opacity and controlled menace. She's compelling in isolation. Deano Bugatti Mitchison plays Victor, the coke-fuelled West End impresario suspected of arson, at Al Pacino in Scarface intensity. He's also compelling in isolation. The problem is that these two registers don't share a tonal language, and the film never finds a third register to mediate between them. Charlie Goddard's Christian — the earnest young actor cast as the lead in Eve's posthumous revival — is the character meant to anchor us, and the film leans on that anchor too hard. He starts hearing Eve's voice coaching his singing, starts developing feelings for her, and the film flirts with ghost-on-human romance in a way that earns the reviewer's word 'ick' with some justification. The 'is she really dead?' question is posed early and never resolved with any satisfaction. The revenge mechanics — flickering lights, rigging flying off walls, tabloids circling Victor — are standard haunted-theatre furniture. None of it is deployed with enough precision to build dread, and the film gradually mistakes accumulation of incident for escalating tension. By the third act, the bafflement is total enough that the reviewer watched it twice looking for the load-bearing plot beat that would retroactively make sense of the structure. There wasn't one. What survives the wreckage is the premise itself, which suggests this story is worth someone trying again with a tighter script. A genuinely talented female composer, wronged by a powerful man in an industry that erases women, returning as a force of artistic and literal destruction — that's a film. This isn't quite it.
