What with all of the drama in Hong Kong recently, I thought we might watch a film from there as it has been a while since the last one. This one was directed by Cheung King Wai who is apparently a documentary filmmaker of some renown but this is his first feature film. It stars Stephy Tang who is a pop star but otherwise everyone else in here are unknowns. Unfortunately this seems to have had a cheap budget and the subsequent production quality looks as amateurish as most of the actors.

The bodies of a middle aged couple, badly decomposed, are found in a reservoir and the case is assigned to pregnant police detective Angela. She quickly tracks down the couple’s high school age daughter Connie who is missing from home, finding her in a cheap hostel with a male friend from school Eric. Angela is initially sympathetic to Connie but the latter quickly confesses that she was the one who murdered her parents. Under questioning, Connie recounts the history of emotional abuse she endured under her parents. Angela also discovers that Connie was assisted by Eric, who is homosexual and bullied in school due to that. He frequently takes refuge in Connie’s room to get away from his own mother and was pressured into taking part in the murders. Meanwhile Angela finds herself becoming increasingly frustrated and angry with her own father who is suffering from dementia.

Hong Kong cinema has a storied history of films about meek people who are driven by bullying and abuse to violent extremes. Many of these are merely puerile or even downright pornographic. This one of course aims to have artistic merit and opens with a quote from Dostoyevsky about how wicked people have naive and simple-hearted natures. From this I divine that we are not meant to truly sympathize with Connie but we are supposed to understand how she came to do what she did. Angela’s half of the story also demonstrates that every ordinary, decent person also possesses a dark streak that can explode into violence if grievances and frustrations are allowed to grow and simmer for too long. What Connie did is evil, just as it is wrong of Angela to take her anger out on her father who after all is no state to know or act any better. The point is that the potential for evil is in all of us.

Unfortunately the director doesn’t quite manage to get that message across. The actress who plays Connie has a cold and dispassionate emotional affect, such that she doesn’t come across as an ordinary girl at all. Her father doesn’t physically abuse her. Instead what he does is a sort of emotional abuse, humiliating her by paying for sex with her classmates or getting into fights with her teachers at school. Her mother is simply silent and passive, submissively acquiescing to her father at every turn and telling on her when she shelters Eric in her room. It’s bad but getting from there to murdering them is still quite a leap. The message is further muddied by extraneous elements, such as Connie’s older brother who lives in the same house and knows nothing of what happened. Then there’s how Eric gets roped into the murder which is simply unbelievable. It’s hard to even understand why he keeps hiding out in Connie’s house and she has to steal food for him. I get the director’s intention but it just doesn’t gel together in a convincing manner to me.

I do appreciate the director’s artistic spin on a relatively simple story but this execution is just too flawed to be called anything good. The production looks cheap, the performers amateurish and even the directing is uncertain. It’s just a weak effort all around.