{"id":79447,"date":"2026-05-18T09:46:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T01:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=79447"},"modified":"2026-05-18T09:46:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T01:46:51","slug":"circus-of-life-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=79447","title":{"rendered":"Circus of Life (2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My wife insisted on watching this in the cinemas, believing that we ought to give local directors a chance. This is the directorial debut of Tham Wai Fook, who is arguably a friend of a friend, and he has apparently been wanting to turn his script into a film for over a decade. This is a clearly a passion project based on elements that are at least partially autobiographical, such as his strange obsession with circuses. Unfortunately just because someone feels strongly for something doesn’t mean that they’re capable of turning it into good art. This film is too long, too unfocused and too self-indulgent. It was so actively bad that I had difficulty watching it to the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Wei is a young man who lives with his girlfriend Mei Mei in a low-income tenement. The neighbors gossip about how he stays at home all day while Mei Mei works and takes care of him. We gather that Wei is mentally ill after suffering from a nervous breakdown and a doctor confirms a diagnosis of schizophrenia. While he is hospitalized, his aged parents travel from the small town where they live to visit him. Realizing that Wei’s spirit has been broken by his failure of realizing his life-long dream of opening a circus, the mother decides to gather Wei’s friends who once shared his dream. She embarks on a journey across Malaysia to meet each of his friends to convince them to come and see him at the hospital, believing that this will cheer him up. Meanwhile Mei Mei discovers that she is pregnant and is unable to take care of Wei. Wi’s sister at first puts him up at the kindergarten that she runs and later arranges for him to stay at a retirement home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even writing this summary makes me cringe with second-hand embarassment with how awful it is. It starts out promisingly enough in setting the stage for Wei and Mei Mei’s domestic life. All of the actors are newcomers and the actor who plays Wei, Tom Phan, at least does his best. Most of the others look the part but are unable to act at all. The longer the film goes on the worse it gets until it loses all coherence. The main plot is seemingly the mother’s quest to gather Wei’s friends. That sounds plausible until the film goes on and on and the mother’s journey with it. Major life events happen during this time. Wei himself moves in and out of different shelters. Each friend entails a mini-quest to get them to join up, like gathering the Fellowship of the Ring<\/em>. We start scratching our heads as there is nowhere in Peninsular Malaysia that cannot be reached in a single day and yet the mother is somehow spending weeks or possibly months on the road? A friend’s father sells his heirloom tea set to fund the journey. All of the friends seemingly put their lives on pause. Time loses all meaning. All this just so that in the end they can visit Wei as a group. Tell me how any of this makes sense?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Believe it or not it actually gets worse. Tham is unable to restrain himself from sprawling out to endless subplots. There are too many characters and every single one of them gets their own subplot. Do we really need an extended scene of Wei’s sister agonizing in her car with an assistant over not being able to take him in herself? Do we need to see his three friends bonding with each other? Why spend an extra 30 seconds showing the mother changing clothes before setting out to meet yet another friend? This director needs an urgent lesson that less is more. His attempts to add humor fall flat too. Why is everyone constantly throwing up in this film? Wei spits out food and pukes to demonstrate his craziness. Mei Mei throws up as the usual cinematic shorthand that she’s pregnant. The mother throws up to prove that she’s enduring motion sickness on the extended road trip. His friend throws up on another friend because it’s… funny?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps worst of all of that the film doesn’t achieve what the director is going for. This has been heavily promoted as being about maternal love but that isn’t what comes across here. The actress who plays the mother looks the part but can’t act so everyone else dominates in every one of the scenes she is in. Meanwhile Mei Mei has far more scenes with Wei and the actress can actually act somewhat so her personal sacrifice feels more palpable. I’m not even going to get into how this is yet another terribly misleading portrayal of mental illness, especially showing that someone can just snap out of it one day. Plus I really dislike romanticizing the pursuit of a personal dream to the point of self-destruction. So he likes circuses? Go to Europe and sign up for a training school or something. This is an insanely implausible film that personally offends me on every level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife insisted on watching this in the cinemas, believing that we ought to give local directors a chance. This is the directorial debut of Tham Wai Fook, who is arguably a friend of a friend, and he has apparently been wanting to turn his script into a film for over a decade. This is … Continue reading Circus of Life (2026)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79447"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79777,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79447\/revisions\/79777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}