Those familiar with Director Edward Yang's previous That Day on the Beach and The Taipei Story will welcome his new stylizations, particularly his subtle use of camera angles and color to create specific atmospheres and the intriguing sound bits that announce scenes before they materialize on screen. Writing in Time Out, Tony Rayns observed: "Yang's masterly film is both challenging and intricately plotted but never remotely obscure. It cross cuts between three distant sets of characters, tracing the devastating effects of a series of prank phone calls made by a bored delinquent girl trapped at her home. Yang gradually makes the parallel lines converge, turning the closing scenes into an ironic reflection on the way that fiction tidies up life's loose ends. But the underlying subject is our endless capacity for inflicting mental and physical damage on each other, and no other film gets closer to the pulse of modern urban realities."