The Flip Side of the Coin: January 2024

Soi Cheang's cinema is forged in pain and insanity. Over the course of the past two decades, he has quietly built an oeuvre that stands shoulder to shoulder with the work of the finest directors of Hong Kong's Golden Age, albeit one situated firmly in the wake of the 1997 Handover that decimated the former colony's film industry. His closest analogue is the great Johnnie To, whose work also slides comfortably between the arthouse/genre film paradigm. But while the relentlessly productive To seems to spin entertaining and substantial works out of thin air, Cheang seems to work at a more deliberate, even tortured pace, at least when he isn't working for hire on the CGI-heavy Monkey King films. Accident (2009) marks the beginning of the full flowering of this tendency after his steady work in horror films during the 2000s; it also marks the beginning of his involvement with To's esteemed production company Milkyway Image and its crew of consummate craftspeople. Cheang's interests and subversions, no matter the genre, have coursed through this set of five films and counting. Perhaps his finest film, Accident recasts the hitman as a film director caught in his very own Conversation: an orchestrator of deaths made to look like freak incidents becomes convinced that his team is being targeted, dissolving his choreographed lifestyle into a haze of paranoia. Motorway (2012), a film about police pursuit drivers, is largely notable for how (relatively) slow most of the chases are, with thrills more menacing than high-octane; critic Filipe Furtado likened them to cat-and-mouse games out of a slasher film. The most unconventional of all is a loose franchise entry: SPL II: A Time for Consequences (2015), one of the greatest martial arts films of the century, takes its organ trafficking set-up as a visceral analogue for the physical damage that must be taken and given in order to right the balance of the world. Cheang's two newest films, Limbo (2021) and Mad Fate (2023), were not conceived as a pair, but their joint US theatrical release this year only highlights their production commonalities: both premiered in the Berlin Film Festival Special section, starred Hong Kong genre stalwart Gordon Lam, and involved significant Milkyway crew (the latter was produced by the studio): cinematographer Cheung Siu-keung, editor David Richardson, and screenwriter Au Kin-yee. While Limbo premiered two years ago, it was actually shot all the way back in 2017, fitting for a film that feels thoroughly out-of-time: a police procedural—shot in luminous black-and-white—about the hunt for a serial killer of women who fixates on severing their left hands, its low-tech shoe leather approach to detective work could take place at any time in the past thirty years. But it couldn't be set anywhere except Hong Kong: much of the film unfolds across the mazelike alleyways and mountainous garbage heaps that the main investigators—Lam as Cham, a forlorn older cop, Mason Lee as Will, a young stickler—endlessly sift through in search of corpses, body parts, and mislaid guns. Only a few other characters truly stick out, most of all Wong To (Cya Liu), a young woman just released from prison for running over Cham's wife, who is forced to inform on virtually every criminal in her network to aid the relentless pursuit of the killer. That twisted form of penance typifies the emotional undertow of this indefatigably bleak film, locking hunter and target into a spiral of degradation down the sewer grate, as propelled by the near-constant pouring rain. This isn't to suggest that Limbo is merely a drudge through the horrors of urbanity: the efficiency of Cheang's filmmaking remains as strong as ever, with a three-pronged chase scene at the midpoint achieving an astounding control over contrasting levels of urgency and motion across multiple perspectives in a single location. But the cruel netherworld that he evokes is all the more potent given the surface pleasures that brought the viewer there. Such a dismal worldview is, if not totally absent, largely leavened in Mad Fate. Gone is Lam's moody, abusive cop; instead, he plays a vehement Buddhist astrologer, obsessed with changing the fates of the doomed via purely spiritual means. Seemingly by chance, one such soul wanders into his path: a young man (Leung Lokman) with a lifelong fixation on killing, whose victims have only consisted of stray cats for the time being. Aside from secondary plots revolving around an unassuming man who is compelled to kill sex workers when it rains and the police officer after both him and the would-be killer, the film concerns itself practically solely with this dynamic, over which the seemingly insurmountable force of Fate looms. This is unmistakably a smaller, more blackly comic affair, less concerned with the implications it has for the denizens of an entire city under siege, yet its concerns feel just as grand because of Cheang's conveyance of his characters' convictions. While Limbo's literal grayness and physical and emotional brutality sought to immerse the viewer in the grime, Mad Fate's bright neons and dramatic CGI clouds are deliberately unreal, as inexplicable as the sudden downpours and mudslides that constantly impede even a chance at a better tomorrow. By their respective ends, the characters embrace the suffering and madness that have ensued, and the mystery plots are thoroughly abandoned in favor of something more inchoate. Cheang's great gift, aside from his immense technical prowess, is his ability to harness those mixed-up emotions into such engaging vessels.