NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL, July 14–30, 2023

[Chris Knipp]

SOI CHEANG: MAD FATE 命案 (2023)


LOKMAN YEUNG AND LAM KA-TUN IN MAD FATE

Fate and free will in the rainy season

Soi Cheang's followup to his Limbo is a deliciously dark and over-the-top action-horror-comedy-thriller about fate, predestination, and Chinese folk beliefs about these things. There will be those who say it goes to far. They can say that in the first ten minutes. If they make it through twenty minutes, they might as well stay for the whole thing.

This is is Hong Kong cinema at its most extreme, gaudy, tacky, absurdist, adept, and decorated with beautiful dramatic clouds of the rainy season. As Edmund Lee says in his South China Morning Post review, tin this "grisly murder mystery," and "pitch-black absurdist comedy" Siu Cheang is mining his "flair for genre experiments" in a "nightmarish roller coaster ride."

There are five main characters. First there is a victimized prostitute, Jo (Wing-Sze Ng), one standing for many. Next there is a serial killer who likes to murder sex workers in times of heavy rain (Charm Man Chan). He will have a sinisterly kind encounter with a mustachioed and omnipresent veteran police detective (Ting Yip Ng) when he's having a leg cramp in a snack shop, posing as a physical therapist. At the center of the action is the so-called Master (Lam Ka-tung), a sort, bespectacled scholarly type madly into feng shui, charms, fate, and all that stuff, and eventually just mad (he turns out to have a family history of mental illness). He joins up with a tall, long-haired Messenger called Siu Tung (Lokman Yeung, of the group Mirror, who proves very cinematic). Siu Tung is part Charles Addams spook, part rock idol. Working as a delivery boy, he is also son of the owners of a nearby Hong Kong style Cha chaan teng restaurant.

Siu Tung murdered a cat when younger and went to jail for it. He's afraid of killing again, and the Master gets onto that, striving frenetically throughout the film to turn around his own karma and Siu Tung's. It turns out knives are tempting to both of them, and keep popping up. And there is that guy murdering prostitutes. And it's very dark, and rainy.

There is a lot of frenetic action, a lot of rain, and time on a dramatic roof full of huge satellite disks like Richard Serra sculptures, where the Master sets up "formations" to rearrange fate and fortune, and the sky and clouds up there are beautiful toward the end. Not many people survive this story, but the cinematography just gets prettier. Time is also spent at a cheap apartment house, in a cemetery, and in a mortuary, with flashbacks to Siu Tung's turbulent childhood In the opening sequence, the Master is mock-burying a prostitute in a cemetery to trick fate out of killing her. Then there is such a heavy rainstorm she almost gets buried for real in the mud. This trauma causes her to miscarry, and back at the brothel, with the storm still on, she is brutally stabbed by the serial killer. The Master's title is ironic, you see.

The brothel is where the Master and Siu Tung meet, the latter on a mis-delivery due to a rain-smudged address. Siu Tung's fascination with the girl's corpse shows he's got some kind of bloodlust.

While the Master grows more frenetic and bonkers as the action progresses, Siu Tung seems to grow saner. He is clearly aware of his buried urge to kill a human and wants the Master to help him resist it.

The screenplay by Yau Nai-hoi and Melvin Li Chun-fai and the rapid editing of David M. Richardson and Allen Leung keep the action non-stop and up to the "mad" of the title. Cinematographer Cheng Siu-keung, who has worked with Johnnie To, helps keep the vistas beautiful and the blood intense. What's mocked here is traditional Chinese folklore, which may get by the censors. This is also a a message to viewers that they have free will - maybe. But as entertaining as this movie is, it's also dumb. It shows Hong Kong filmmaking is good at blending comedy and horror. Edmund Lee says it may show "a new narrative template" to "dazzle the censors" while still getting "filmmakers’ messages across" in spite of all the "creative red lines in Hong Kong’s post-national-security-law era."

Mad Fate 命案 , 108 mins., debuted at the Berlinale in Feb. 2023, showing also at Hong Kong, Udine and Singapore festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the July 14-30, 2023 New York Asian Film Festival.
Showtime: Saturday Jul 22, 2:15pm, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.