New York Asian Film Festival (July 11-27, 2025 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

PHILIP KEUNG HO-MAN AND CANDY WANG IN POSSESSION STREET

JACK LAI: POSSESSION STREET 邪Mall (2024)

An exorcism for wartime wrongs?

This film is very polished for something shot in 21 days at night in an old Hong Kong mall, and contains an appealing grouop of characters, but as zombie vampire tales go it may lack the shocks devotees long for. As one writer says, in the early stages of the zombification, the film "leans more towards revulsion than terror" and, as a Letterboxed sage comments, the full-on fighting quickly seems repetitions. However, it's all framed in a way that is specially meaningful. It comes out of Hong Kong, once a realm of rich culural possibilities and a hotbed of exciting movie production, but now shrinking to only a hollow shell of what it once was. Thus Possession Street, whose symbolic value is multiple. According to one local source, it's one in a "noticeable roster" of films that center on "a once-familiar place of communal activities that has descended into horror and anarchy," including the films Back Home and Yum Investigation.

This "possession street" is an old mall, now in decline. Opening black and white segments, narrated in part with a voice speaking in American English and skillfully mimicking World War II newreels, show us this place was bombed by GI's out to kill "Japs." Underlying the whole story, then, perhaps, is the idea that angry, resentful spirits live in this place, lingering from a wartime massacre, because several civilians who were accidentally trapped inside a bomb shelter during an air raid turned to murder and cannibalism. The run-down recent shopping center sits on the site of this gruesome tragedy. Warm little stories follow about current inhabitants of the mall, central among them video store owner Sam (Philip Keung Ho-man) a frustrated former movie stunt man, and his ptomising and attrctive daughter Yan (Candy Wong).

We see the pair when the daughter was just a girl and was excited by lessons in doing flips and manipulating a warrior sword in midair. Now, relations sour when Sam, who has sold the sword for the money, discovers that Yan has dropped out of architeture school. She is going around with a handsome young man with a camera and now pledges to make movies, with the goal "to keep Hong Kong cinema alive." Her love of cinema of course was inspired by her father's involvement in the wuxia films people aren't buying or renting from him much anymore.

Suddenly, due to the accidental breach in a supernatural barrier in the basement, seven vengeful spirits emerge in a cloud of orange dust that begins turning the local mall dwellers into man-eating zombies, who can be identified when turned by little blobs looking rather like candies hanging randomly from their heads or faces, an unusual creation due to makeup artist Mark Garbarino. One writer sees this as the beginning of "a battle for Hong Kong’s survival," though dire city-wide consequences are only hintedf at in the dialogue.

Mai Yun Tang (Yang Weilun), a would be Taoist priest and local authority on folk ritual, teams up with Sam and Yan to set up a Taoist procedure of exorcism involving ancient passwords, diagrams, entertwined red ropes in a circle, and imprecations, carried out along with all-out bashing and stabbing of the possessed ones. This is very nicely done - though, again, I'm not sure how much hardcore fans of vampire movies would care. At film's end, which arrives at a nimple ninety-six minutes, the Taoist red rope circle has come to surrounnd a heap of scattered corpses, and, in black and white again, the intact forms of the turned locals, of all who have just died, return to say goodbye to Yan. Edward Lee, writing about this film for the English-language South China Post, thinks "the key takeaway" of this film is "nostalgia for a vanished recent past" and this may be right. It is as if filmmakers in Hong Kong are frantically gesturing to us about their sense of loss. Furthermore, I now learn that Possession Street is the former site of Possession Point, where the British took possession of Hong Kong in 1841. Perhaps that is what relly haunts them, and us. For more on the larger implications of this film see Hayley Scanlon's review in Windows on Worlds.. A promising feature debut for Jack Lai.

Candy Wong, aka Wang Jiaqing, a member of the girl band Collar, is appearing in a movie here for the first time.

Possession Street 邪Mall (or "Evil Mall"; the character refers to "unhealthy influences that cause disease" in Chinese medecine), 96 mins., debuted in the west at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival July 11-27, 2025.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 19, 3:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center