The Hours, a highly moody and depressing movie about suicidal women, comes at a distressing time of war and the shocking real-life suicide of HK singer Leslie Cheung. The movie is slow, and to most audiences, considerably dull.

I enjoyed it because of its experimental form and its overall moodiness. Haven't had a movie that deals with sadness since the excellent Shadowlands starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. This movie is bold enough to go at a languid pace, with little humour as it unravels the grieve and desolation of its three central characters played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. These characters inhabit different times and circumstances but suffering the same inescapable fate of being imprisoned in a contented life which is inwardly empty. "Mrs Dalloway", the novel by Virginia Woolf becomes the common theme that binds the three stories together.

Leslie Cheung's suicide and "The Hours" make me think about depression and how it can suck a person in like a vortex until he is incapable of pulling himself out. Moments like this haunts a person every now and then. One stares ahead and see the years, and days and the hours as an abyss of utter emptiness; and in moments like this, one feels so utterly lonely and vulnerable, unable and even unwiling to face life.

Sometimes, it seems all our days of joyfulness and confidence is there for us to nurture a store of inner strength to face these unavoidable confrontations with darkness.For these moments are the real tests of life. May God give us the strength to weather them all.