An immolated teenager flailing in a run down tenement. A doubledecker bus suspended above a relaxed sea bay. A dishevelled middle-aged couple frolicking down a excessive avenue, caught in their very own personal musical. There’s an irrepressible fountain of dream imagery erupting out of Nick Cheung’s fourth function, which imagines Hong Kong after the 2008 monetary crash as a nightmarish inland empire awash in outrage, anguish and guilt. “Other people’s money!” crows one investor – however the actual enterprise right here is different folks’s goals.
Loose-cannon psychiatrist Dr Man (Terrance Lau) is underneath censure from his bosses for investigating his sufferers’ personal lives. Maybe it’s his personal uneasy goals that encourage him to trespass, although a brand new weird case provides him added trigger to go the additional mile. A narcoleptic taxi driver admitted to hospital after nodding off and veering into the alternative lane, Choi (Nick Cheung) is trapped in a twilight between actuality and reverie. Prying into the circumstances as soon as once more, Dr Man discovers one thing much more disturbing on the man’s house: his spouse Fiona (Fala Chen), an obsessive shut-in who displays monetary feeds.
A Hong Kong business veteran and Johnnie To bit-player, Cheung has inherited some of that grasp director’s manner with fine-milled visuals; his lambent and baffling headscapes additionally really feel very reminiscent of one other maestro, the pricey departed David Lynch. Initially presenting these visions in fragmentary style, threading between Man, Choi, Fiona and a former psychiatrist (an Andy Lau cameo) who claims to enter folks’s goals, the irrational is town’s governing drive – surfacing each within the nocturnal unconscious and stock-market eddies.
The transition to a extra typical narrative shadowing Dr Man’s shrink-cum-gumshoe is just a little abrupt, dissipating the movie’s oneiric kick. And a stylist although he undoubtedly is, Cheung doesn’t make investments closely sufficient in a single character to carry the story house. That’s particularly clear within the case of Choi and Fiona’s supposedly fateful love affair, wafted alongside, in a Wong Kar-Wai-esque contact, on the old-timey strains of Broadway standard Peg O’ My Heart. Instead, considerably disingenuously Cheung pushes Man’s credo of emotional honesty to the fore. This powerfully textured psychological warren he has lovingly created says in any other case.
