Samurai Hustle (超高速！参勤交代, Katsuhide Motoki, 2014)

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A kindhearted lord finds himself in deep trouble when he’s suddenly called back to Edo despite having just returned from his biennial service in Katsuhide Motoki’s jidaigeki comedy Samurai Hustle (超高速！参勤交代, Chokosoku! Sankin Kotai). Set in 1735, the film is in some senses unusual in pointing the various class biases even with the hierarchal samurai society as the tiny rural clan at the film’s centre are swept into intrigue by the machinations of an ambitious courtier who thinks they lied about their goldmine being extinct and plans to get his hands on it by dobbing them in to the Shogun.

The problem is that they really weren’t lying. The Yunagaya clan is dirt poor, especially after having spent a small fortune travelling to Edo and back. In this era, even distant lords were called to Edo every two years to serve at court. They were expected to parade to the capital in style, showing off their wealth and status as they go which is of course inordinately expensive. The expense was the point. Practices like these along with forcing clans to move domains on a whim were designed to weaken their resources so they’d have no recourse to rebellion even if they were even more annoyed about being forced to travel back and fore for no real reason. 

It took Lord Naito (Kuranosuke Sasaki) and his retinue 10 days to walk home, which is why it’s even more of a shock to get a letter telling them to high-tail it back in five or risk being dissolved by the shogun. Evil retainer Nobutoki (Takanori Jinnai) knows it’s impossible for them to arrive on time which is how he plans to get his hands on the gold. What he didn’t count on, however, is the unexpected scrappiness of a “backwoods samurai” who’s used to having to find ingenious solutions to difficult problems because he doesn’t have the money to solve them. Nobutoki is essentially a snob who looks down on country folk and thinks Naito does not befit the rank of a samurai anyway, sneering at his humble gift for the Shogun of some locally sourced daikon pickles. 

The homeliness of the daikon signals Naito’s down to earth nature as a fairly egalitarian samurai who doesn’t really care about hierarchy and status even if he knows he has to play the game. What he cares about is the safety and happiness of his people, which is one reason he’s going to bust his arse to get back to Edo and clear his name. Aside from his humanitarian principles, also giving away some of their rice stocks to neighbouring clans suffering during a time of famine, Naito is also thought of as an eccentric because of his severe claustrophobia which makes it impossible for him to close the door when using the bathroom, let alone travel in a palanquin, though he’s found an ingenious solution for that one too. 

In an odd kind of paradox, he becomes a defender to proper samurai values in his opposition to Nobutoki who plays fast and dirty, sending out ninja assassins on the road to try to ensure he won’t make it to Edo before the deadline. Meanwhile, he bonds with a feisty sex worker who, like him, is dealing with childhood trauma and is sick of entitled noblemen who look down on the poor despite being a fellow human who as she puts it poops and screws just like everyone else. In a way she frees him from the confines of his hierarchal existence by helping him overcome his claustrophobia, at least while she’s at his side, while he saves her from her oppression by transgressing class boundaries and bringing her into the samurai world if only as a concubine.

Nevertheless, as he warns her, being poor is hard even when you’re a samurai, and ironically his circumstances aren’t much better than hers even if he has a superficial level of comfort and security tempered by his genuine ability to appreciate the simple charms of daikon over fancy Edo cuisine. After all, sometimes samurai become peasants or peasants become samurai and for an impoverished lord like Naito the distinction is fairly thin, though he evidently does his best to protect those around him from both sides of the class divide while remaining unafraid to tell the Shogun exactly what he thinks of him. After all, you’ve got to roll with the times, especially if you’re a backwoods samurai at the mercy of a harsh and arbitrary system but also far enough away from the mechanisms of power to begin to ignore them. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Grand Grandmaster (乜代宗師, Dayo Wong, 2020)

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Are you actually “the grandmaster” or just a bit “grand”, the hero of The Grand Grandmaster (乜代宗師) is eventually forced to ask himself after being confronted with the various levels of his self-delusion. Legend has it that comedian Dayo Wong sold an apartment to finance his second directorial feature in order to produce a purely local film without having to submit himself to the strictures of the Mainland censors’ board or accept funding from the greater PRC, a move which endeared him to the young protestors then still out in the streets campaigning for democracy. The Grand Grandmaster was one of the few New Year films to make into cinemas before they shut down because of the pandemic but aside from Wong’s grand gesture is perhaps light on political content, save for a mild satire on the commercialisation of kung fu. 

The Grand Grandmaster, Ma Fe-lung (Dayo Wong Chi-Wah), is the latest guardian of the Ma Ka Thunder Style martial art apparently carried by one of his ancestors to Hong Kong from the Mainland during the Song dynasty. Ma Ka Thunder has since become something of a brand with its own dedicated merchandising line and video ads playing on giant billboards featuring Fei-lung himself as the face of the organisation. His hopes for US expansion along with his general business plan are disrupted when he gets into a public altercation with an old man who tries to steal his taxi and then makes a scene claiming that Fei-lung hit him leading Chan Tsang (Annie Liu Xin-You), the “boxing goddess”, to emerge from the shadows and give Fei-lung a public beating. Filmed by everyone in the surrounding area, the event becomes a viral phenomenon that leaves Fei-lung humiliated but while his minions urge him towards a public rematch to regain his reputation, Fei-lung is consumed with despair on realising there is no way he could ever hope to defeat the feisty young woman. 

Wong has fun satirising the lore of kung fu as Fei-lung outlines the strange tenets of the Ma Ka Thunder Style which turns out to make more sense that it first seems only generations of practitioners have it seems forgotten something quite fundamental. Fei-lung and his associates have to ask themselves if the art of Ma Ka is really just “fake fighting”, something suggested to Fei-lung by his loyal assistant who makes a point of overdoing his defeat and admits he only stays with the school because living outside is hard and here he gets room and board. Urged to show his full strength, he effortlessly defeats his master but only by abandoning Thunder Style for a selection of moves from other martial arts. 

The remainder of the film sees Fei-lung trying to “dodge” Tsang, firstly by trying to bribe her to throw the fight for him and then by convincing her to get more “comfortable” with the idea of losing. Events take a rather strange turn when Tsang’s dad gets involved and starts training Fei-lung for real in an effort to get back at his daughter for quitting boxing after a single defeat apparently humiliating him in another nod to the film’s strangely sexist worldview. Tsang bizarrely falls for Fei-lung after witnessing the depths of his self-delusion in his complex relationship with his ex-wife, building to a crisis which accidentally makes a case for domestic violence in insisting that Tsang will only believe that Fei-lung really loves her if he defeats her in the ring. 

Nevertheless, the conclusion is an oddly egalitarian one in which there is no win, no lose, no draw. Fei-lung realises the various ways in which he’s been deluding himself and presumably emerges with a little more clarity, awakened to the true meaning of the “virtue like water” motto of Ma Ka Thunder Style which apparently lies in generosity of spirit, giving without expecting in return and like water trickling down. Which is to say, Fei-lung learns to stop dodging life’s blows, to give up on tricks and fakery, and to be a little more authentic, which is perhaps how he wins Tsang’s heart and respect. A committed performance from Liu helps to mitigate some otherwise flat comedy though the saga of the kung fu con man rediscovering his sense of social responsibility through a true appreciation of martial arts never quite hits home, while a strange mid-credits diversion perhaps proves one move too far.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Yadang: The Snitch (야당, Hwang Byeng-gug, 2025)

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A Korean prosecutor can make or break a president, according to the ambitious Ku (Yoo Hae-jin) making a final power play to put an arrogant chaebol son in his place. But Ku isn’t trying to make a stand for the rule of law so much as bend it to his own will while securing his position, because in the world of Yadang: The Snitch (야당) justice is largely illusionary while mediated through the complex interplay between the social and political elite, crime, and law enforcement.

The hero, Kang-su (Kang Ha-neul), makes this plain in explaining that the big drug busts that get the police into the papers are largely all orchestrated through the snitchery of yadang like himself, a set up in which low-level drug users are encouraged to become police informants in return for lenient sentences allowing the detectives to take care of the dealers. Perhaps that’s all very well, as detective Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon) says, there’s no point locking up hundreds of users because the supply is endless and it makes no difference to the business. Kang-su’s likening of them cockroaches is a little problematic, even if he has a point that if you want to get rid of the infestation you have to go in for the nest.

But it turns out the nest is in an unexpected place because the nexus of corruption is in the government and political system which has been infiltrated by wealthy businessmen looking to further their own ambitions through politics while their feckless children behave like princelings knowing they can do whatever they want and then ring their fathers to make whatever consequences might occur go away. Though the film doesn’t go too deeply into it, there is something in the fact that both Ku and Kang-su come from poor, single-parent families though the direction of their ambitions might be quite different. Ku has studied hard to become a prosecutor and escape his poverty, but has only 10 years to make it into the top ranks or be forced to resign. He exploits Kang-su’s desire for wealth and agency to help him achieve his ambitions but though he describes him as a brother, is all too ready to throw him under the bus once he’s no longer useful to him. 

For his part, Kang-su relishes his role within this ironic system as someone on the fringes of crime but also facilitating law enforcement without being manipulated by the police in the same way that their informants often are. Sang-jae swears to protect a young actress after picking her up in a bust if she helps him catch the kingpins but in the end he can’t do it, partly because of Ku, but also because at the end of the day his fellow officers have the same opinion of their snitches as Ku does his and aren’t terribly invested in their safety or wellbeing. After getting caught up in Ku’s showboating raid on a hotel where chaebol son Hoon is partying with yakuza drug dealers, Su-jin’s (Chae Won-bin) career is ruined and on her release she has only the drug scene to rely on with the consequence that she becomes an addict and a dealer herself.

But it was Hoon (Ryu Kyung-soo) that made her a user in the first place by spiking a drink and then went on to use his privilege to control her and make sure that she stayed within his orbit. Ambitious men like Ku make their deals and let the chaebol sons get away with their crimes, though his late in the game attempt to remind Hoon that he could ruin his father’s chances of becoming Korea’s next president if he chose to implies his own sense of worthiness that he is actually above this illusionary elite though he may be overestimating his reach. These three branches of branches of power operate in a symbiotic system and need each other to survive. Ku is only really a kind of Yadang himself, mediating between a social and political elite while enjoying only the illusion of power and independence. Hwang ups the action stakes with some high impact set pieces including that in which Kang-su uses the brute force of his Hummer to literally bulldoze a car full of drug dealers while the police chase after them with metal poles, but seems to suggest the real violence stems from the system if ultimately opting for an ironic buddy cop conclusion in which Kang-su uses his considerable skills in a more legitimate fashion.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sasori in U.S.A. (Daisuke Goto, 1997)

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An attempt to reboot the Female Prisoner Scorpion series for V-cinema had stalled in the early ‘90s when the then star of Death Threat abruptly pulled out of a sequel that was to be a production with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. In 1997, however, Nami Matsushima was once again resurrected only this time as a US co-production with most of the film shot in Los Angeles and in a mix of Japanese and English. 

Relocating the franchise overseas is in some ways surprising given that the first film of the original series opened with the national anthem and shots of the Japanese flag. It was explicitly clear that they were talking primarily about the social conditions of Japan in the 1970s. Likewise, Sasori in U.S.A. seems to walk back on some of the themes of patriarchal oppression that informed the previous instalments preferring instead to refocus on themes such as racism, the failure of the American Dream, and the powerlessness of living under a cruel and arbitrary foreign power, which is an entirely contrary perspective to the earlier film’s attempts at critiquing corruption with Japan itself. 

It’s never really made clear why Jiro (Tetta Sugimoto) and Nami (Yoko Saito) are in the US in the first place, though Nami’s sympathetic journalist friend implies that Jiro came there to make his fortune only to become frustrated with the limits of the American Dream. This Nami is a well-paid interior designer, at least according to her prison file, if one completely in thrall to Jiro whom she met in the US an unspecified amount of time previously. When Jiro is killed by a car bomb, Nami ends up being arrested for his murder because she stood to gain 1.2 million dollars by his death (though they appeared to have a very comfortable life to begin with, so it’s not clear why she’d take such drastic action). Apparently too traumatised to defend herself, Nami failed to hire a proper lawyer or fight her case and has not launched an appeal but spends all her time vowing revenge, which of course means she has to escape from prison. 

That might be a minor problem for the film, which is to some extent in its marketing selling itself as a women in prison picture. This is indeed the most exploitative of the films so far with a salacious shower scene and titivating moments of touching and kissing each other, while Nami is also harassed by an obnoxious blonde prisoner who seems to be running the cell block while in cahoots with the sadistic warden who, as this is America, is incredibly religious and forever quoting from the Bible while raping his inmates. Nami eventually stabs him in the eye in what may be an homage to the original series. 

Nevertheless, Nami soon escapes in the company of another prisoner who is second generation Japanese-American and has been blind since birth. Like Nami, Yukiko (Shizuka Ochi) also has a mission of revenge against the American hoodlums who raped her and shot her Dominican boyfriend Dino to death. Though the narrative actually has almost nothing to do with Female Prisoner Scorpion, the twist will be very obvious to anyone familiar with the series as Nami has indeed been betrayed by a man she thought loved her. Discovering Jiro may have been embezzling money and in fact knocking off the lawyers who tried to sue the car company he worked for for making defective cars rather than being knocked off by them, Nami is forced to reckon with the illusionary quality of her American success story. Jiro meanwhile rails about entrenched racism and unfairness, decrying the police and justice system as “insane” which they well might be or at least in their treatment of Nami. Broken by the failure of his American Dream, he becomes a pitiful and tragic figure.

Even so, Nami’s revenge remains a personal affair rather than an all out attack on a corrupt and oppressive social order ruled by misogyny and male failure. Though the production values are perhaps a little higher than one might expect and the direction leaning towards the artier side with its blue-tinted eroticism, shower scenes aside, the film remains very much of its time and has very little in common with the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise save its women in prison elements and a late allusion to an actual scorpion. It is though interesting for its perspective on the American Dream and America in general as a place of greed, violence, and intensely hypocritical religious fanaticism. 

Edhi Alice (에디 앨리스: 리버스, Kim Il-ran, 2024)

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“I’m Alice, who is living in the present,” one of the two protagonists of Kim Il-ran’s documentary Edhi Alice tells the camera when asked to introduce herself. A transwoman in her 40s, Alice got her name from film director Lee Joon-ik while working on Dong-ju: The Portrait of a Poet, a film inspired by the life of a poet who died as a political prisoner yearning for freedom and authenticity in a Japanese jail during the colonial era. 

Freedom and authenticity are both things that Alice has found in her transition and is continuing to seek. As a child, she had a consciousness of herself as female until her sister remarked in a phone call that she was becoming a man after noticing that her voice was breaking. Surrounded by an intensely patriarchal society, Alice convinced herself to conform to common notions of masculinity, even getting married in an attempt to live as a man and prove herself as one by having a child. Only after the marriage ended did she begin to embrace her authentic self by undergoing surgery which, she points out, is somewhat unusual in that she chose to remove her genitals right away because she couldn’t bear to live with the reminder of her masculinity. However, she has avoided other kinds of medical interventions such as plastic surgery stating that she doesn’t see the point now that she is already in her 40s and has no plans to date. 

She does, however, live in a more liminal space in which her transness is not immediately apparent while working in a stereotypically masculine industry as a lighting director for film and TV in which, as she points out, her height and strength are definite advantages. Though she says she has not experienced much prejudice and discrimination while working on films, she reveals that she was dismissed from a TV project because the producers were “ultra-conservative” and did not want to work with her. Meanwhile, there’s a genuine poignancy in the crew’s visit to a public bath as Alice reflects that she probably won’t ever have the opportunity to visit one again, suggesting that she most likely won’t be admitted to the women’s bath given her gender presentation and fears may make people uncomfortable if she were. 

Edhi doesn’t have the same trouble, but has not yet completed her transition having visited a fortune teller and been advised to wait until a more auspicious time. Working as a councillor for LGBTQ+ youth, she assumed she must have been gay because she liked men but only later came to realise after joining an LGBTQ+ choir that the gay men around her did not experience the same kind of discomfort in their bodies and that she must be trans. But like Alice, she originally tried to conform to what it means to be a man in Korean society. When she tried to explain her identity to her mother, she had dismissed it by saying that it was only because she didn’t want to serve in the military. Trans people are not welcomed in the armed forces and Edhi reflects on the death of Byun Hui-su who fought for her right to serve by beginning her transition while on leave from military service. Her desire to continue being a member of the armed forces was denied and she was dismissed. She later took her own life.

While affected by the deaths of so many people around her who could not find a way to survive amid the intensely conformist pressures of Korean society, Edhi does her best to live her life while taking care of her parents and nephews. Though her father might use male pronouns and continue to refer to her as his son and her mother, though supportive, worries that she might regret her choices later, Edhi was surprised by the ease with which her nephews simply accepted her explanation of her transness and agreed that “Edhi is just Edhi,” agreeing to call her by her name rather than uncle or aunt. She fears being forgotten and regrets having thrown away photos of her other life but continues to pursue her dream of living in a house with her mother and opening a cafe. While never shying away from the physical pain involved in transitioning, the film reinforces the sense of liberation it can bring if tempered by the realities of life in contemporary Korea.

Edhi Alice screens at the ICA 18th May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Hunt the Wicked (缉恶, Chris Huo Suiqiang, 2024)

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Once again set in a fictional South East Asian nation, Chris Huo Suiqiang’s Hunt the Wicked (缉恶, jī è) neatly unites the contemporary obsessions of political corruption and drugs as an earnest cop discovers he has an unexpected ally in a man he first assumed to be a crook. Consequently, and perhaps subversively, he realises that these twin problems can only be rooted out from outside of the official justice system and the rules of conventional law enforcement.

The opening sequence sees Wei Yunzhou (Andy On) and his wife Na Mei (Hong Suang) go after a chemistry professor who has secretly been working on a new techno drug called Ice Spider for a kingpin named King Long whom they have yet to identify. Making off with the designer drugs encased in ice, Wei Yunzhou is later confronted by hero cop Huang Minjin (Tse Miu) who takes the credit for their recovery. The city of Wusuli had been regarded as drug free as Huang and his colleagues had already rounded up all of the local dealers, but in fact, despite what Huang’s superiors instruct him to say in the press conference, the drugs were manufactured locally and that there’s another gang in town who are now running the entire operation alone.

A subplot about cleaning up the sewers to make the water drinkable hints at the embedded corruption of the society in which the mayor, who ran on a Duterte-esque anti-drugs platform, is later revealed to be the mysterious kingpin King Long and in effect merely used his position to take out the competition. Wei’s wife Na Mie later also hints at a persistent sense of elitism and inequality as Huang refuses to believe her claims that people are being abducted and used as drug mules against their will by insisting that it’s impossible for large numbers of people to be going missing under the radar. Pointing out most of them were from the slums, Namie explains the truth is they simply weren’t missed and the system so little values the lives of those like her from poor areas that it doesn’t bother to account for them. 

Though Wei first seems like he wants to take over the drugs business in Wusuli, it soon turns out that he as something else on his mind and like Huang is pursuing a noble mission in trying to get revenge against King Long. Realising they share a common goal, the two men generate an uneasy alliance as they team up to expose the mayor and take down not only Kin Long but all the other gangs who are working with him while setting free all the people he stole from the slums and getting rid of the source of corruption before mayor Song Pa can be elected as governor making him otherwise unassailable.

Huo ups the action stakes while making use of top stars Tse Miu and Andy On one of whom fights with a sledge hammer on a chain and the other a retractable knife on a wire. In some ways, these two weapons represent their approaches to justice, with Huang pictured on TV using the sledge hammer to smash through the ice and expose the drugs. He makes a noise and does everything in the open. Huang is so old school, he can’t even work the new printer. Wei meanwhile is a silent killer slicing and dicing with his knife on a string while otherwise using it to craft salmon sashimi at every conceivable opportunity. He’s pursuing his own kind of justice in the shadows and playing a long game that makes it unclear whose side he’s really on until it becomes obvious that he doesn’t really care about drugs or even really the corruption. He’s motivated solely by vengeance that is tinged with righteousness in that like Huang he is also trying to get justice for his men who were also casualties in this duplicitous war on drugs. 

As usual, the film ends with a roundup of the punishments all the guilty parties were given after being caught and arrested to ram home the message that both corruption and drugs are definitely bad things that no one should have anything to do with. It does however accidentally endorse the hero’s brand of rogue justice even if each of them also pay a price for stepping outside of the accepted rules of law enforcement. Then again, the fates of each of the female characters attached to the three leading men leave a sour taste in the mouth in rendering each of them mere plot devices in the guys’ machinations. The same could be said for the awkward characterisation of female police officer Tianyu (Gu Jing) as the squad’s maternal figure in her obsession with getting everyone their favourite dinner while simultaneously at the centre of a love triangle between boxing cop Li (Anson Leung Chun Yat) and the intense Huang. Nevertheless, the film more than makes up for any shortcomings in its high-octane action sequences and impressive production values.

Hunt the Wicked is released on Digital in the US on May 20 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Bel Ami (漂亮朋友, Geng Jun, 2024)

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In the opening scenes of Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, a middle-aged man poses for a series of nude photos. The pictures and the poses echo a long history of queer iconography, but at first the man stands with his back to us. We can’t see his face, and he is hiding from us who he really is even as his nakedness suggests a desire for authenticity and a demand that we recognise his identity. “It’s repressive,” another man sighs, complaining that like everyone else he is forced to keep a part of himself hidden and is painfully lonely because of it. 

Like Geng’s other films set in Heilongjiang, Mainland China, the film’s queer themes would not play well with the censor’s board who are notoriously squeamish of any reference to the LGBTQ+ community and has found success only by screening in Taiwan where it won several categories at the Golden Horse Awards. There is a minor irony in play as a certain character makes clear in his rendition of the Internationale that the queer community in China has long referred to each other as “tongzhi” or “comrade” but do so to express solidarity against the oppressive authoritarian government which isolates and others them, preventing them from living authentically as full and free members of society. 

When Zhiyong spots a man he assumes to be gay in a cafe, he addresses him as “tongzhi”, but the man first denies his identity and responds to Zhiyong’s question about why he’s dressed in what he sees as a stereotypically gay manner if he’s not actually gay by saying that his son is really into rock music so he’s trying to look “cool”. He later confirms that he is actually gay and is annoyed his outfit is giving him away while similarly worried that Zhiyong will expose him. By contrast, a pair of lesbians sit in the next booth over and are overt and open in their relationship. They remark that the men behind them appear to be hiding something, while one insists that men have no morals or integrity. 

Xuanyu is, however, the most authoritarian of all as she keeps gay barber Quan, the prospective father of their child, under total surveillance. She insists on micromanaging his life, stalking him and installing a camera hidden in a clock in his barber shop. Her partner tells her love is freedom and asks if that’s what they give each other when they receive little of it from elsewhere, though it’s a question with no answer. Xuanyu is happy with the way that things are. She’d rather adopt than involve a man in their desire for a child and suggests just eloping while her partner says her parents would never accept it. Shooting in a crisp black and white that adds to the film’s breezy, deadpan humour, Geng switches to colour only once as Jing poses in a wedding dress only to be joined by a reluctant Quan suggesting a possible marriage of convenience that will satisfy both of their families and their filial obligations in the birth of their child. Quan leaves the frame as soon as possible, taking his flowers with him, for Xuanyu to enter now dressed in a black suit and occupying the space the groom.

Quan had been the lover of the man in the nude photos, Gang, but abruptly broke up with him. A baker who likes to strike back against an unforgiving society by hiding stands of his hair in his bread, Gang is also isolated and lonely, fearing he won’t be able to find another partner. He ends up meeting Zhiyong at an exclusive and very weird gay membership club run by “K” for King who gives Zhiyong the “codename” “Apollo” and immediately embarks on a sadomasochistic game pressuring Zhiyong for sexual favours as a means of joining the community expressing the way in which the oppressed oppress each other. While semi-stalked by an incredibly lonely and socially awkward restaurant owner, Zhiyong first runs from his queer identity but eventually finds a kind of hope and freedom in his relationship with Gang. They are each searching for connection and the freedom to love and be loved which is also in its way a means of resistance against entrenched authoritarianism. Don’t lose hope, they encourage each other while basking in the isolated patch of sunshine of the freedom they have found. 

Bel Ami screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Three Adventures of Brooke (星溪的三次奇遇, Yuan Qing, 2018)

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“The people you meet are only reflections of your own state of mind” according to a sympathetic tarot reader in Yuan Qing’s Three Adventures of Brooke (星溪的三次奇遇, xīng xī de sāncì qíyù). Perhaps that’s why she herself is slightly different each time we meet her, experiencing three sets of parallel encounters as she searches for meaning in a foreign land. Echoing Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Brooke’s three encounters allow her to examine more of herself until she learns to open her heart, no longer suspicious or afraid but ready to see the world’s beauty even in its sadness. 

20-something Brooke (Xu Fangyi) has come to Alor Setar in Malaysia from Beijing. This appears to be a concrete fact, though many other things about her will change, at least in our perception of her. On June 30, her bicycle gets a puncture and she’s stuck, alone, in the middle of a country road without knowing who to ask for help. A series of strangers come to her rescue beginning with Ailing (Ribbon Ooi), a local girl who can speak Mandarin as well as Malaysian and Hokkien, who happens by Brooke looking distressed and takes her home where she shares some handy bicycle repair tips while explaining that her tyres were too pumped up for the head local climate and likely to explode. 

Brooke tells Ailing that she came to Alor Setar to visit her researcher father, but that he preferred to hang out with his colleagues, all geeky middle-aged men, playing mahjong and singing karaoke, so she got bored and decided to go travelling. The central crisis occurs when Brooke ventures into a shop selling crystals and is convinced to buy an extremely expensive one which is apparently something of a unique item. Brooke shows the crystal off to Ailing, but she’s quietly outraged, sure that Brooke has been taken advantage of by the unscrupulous salesman. Ailing takes it upon herself to try and get some of the money back, while Brooke assumes that Ailing has tricked her and made off with her “extremely valuable” piece of rock which the salesman assured her would help her find all the things she desires. In a strange way it does. Making her first enquiry with the tarot reader, she’s told that her own suspicious nature is to blame, the stone isn’t missing only in the wrong place and will be found again. She realises that she was wrong to suspect Ailing who has become a genuine friend, while regaining the stone for a much lower price only makes her question its value. 

It’s value and fear that concern her in second adventure which is taken with three chatty part-time council workers apparently working on a regeneration project designed to “accentuate” historical culture to make it more desirable to the young, though their intentions ma perhaps destroy the peculiar tranquillity of Alor Setar, turning it into just another anonymous town of glass and steel. This time around, Brooke tells them that she’s an anthropologist interested in the relationship between people and cities, but spends the day desperately trying to get away from the three guys who are both boring and perhaps mildly threatening in their determination to railroad her into doing as they please. 

The second encounter proving hugely satisfactory, on the third iteration of June 30, Brooke finds herself desperately pushing her bike towards somewhere that might be able to help her, eventually arriving at a garage where she meets melancholy blocked writer, Pierre (Pascal Greggory). This Brooke is a wounded widow, though unlike her previous two incarnations she already knows the secret of “Alor Setar” and has come because of it. Asked what “Alor Setar” meant, Ailing could only reply that it was just a place name and otherwise unimportant, while the guys had made a point of having a plaque made in English explaining that it means “starry brook” which happens to be the same as Brooke’s Chinese name. She’s come hoping to see this titular waterway, but is repeatedly told that it doesn’t exist before being guided towards it by a rather snarky “god”, only to be disappointed on its discovery. Pierre, meanwhile, is on a search for Blue Tears, on which she decides to accompany him, unburdening herself on her recent trauma to quiet, ironically fatherly older man on his own quest for meaning. “It’s a sad and beautiful world” he murmurs, accidentally or otherwise quoting Jarmusch’s Down By Law. The Blue Tears burn out bright, lighting the way as they go. Age has taught Pierre that it’s enough to live peacefully surrounded by the people you love, while Brooke is learning something similar in opening her heart to small moments of beauty and the fleeting joy of serendipitous meetings.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Beast Hand (獣手, Taichiro Natsume, 2024)

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This world makes monsters of us all in Taichiro Natsume’s low-budget indie body horror Beast Hand (獣手, Kemonote). In many ways, Osamu (Takahiro Fukuya) is pursued by his own left arm in his continual powerlessness and tendency towards self-destructive acts of crime and violence. But it’s also true that it isn’t just his hand that makes him monstrous to the world around him and that his “deformity” is also symbolic of the ways in which he is excluded from mainstream society.

Indeed, Osamu already lives a marginal existence in a cramped, reclaimed space on the edges of a town. Having served time in prison, he gets by doing casual labour and quite literally kicking the can down the road, while we also seem him shoplift a can beer after paying for his dinner. His life appears to be defined by futility even before Inui (Yota Kawase), a man with whom he seems to have shared a criminal past, arrives on his doorstep and barges his way back into his life. Technically on parole but having absconded from his probation office, Inui forces Osamu to give up the contact details for his old girlfriend, Koyuki (Misa Wada), who stopped visiting him in prison and was apparently so desperate to get away from him that she had “full body surgery” to essentially become someone else and start a new life.

Starting a new life is it seems something that they both want to do but are each unable to shake off the hold that Inui has over them. He, however, is in the same position and though he bullies and assaults them both, bows down before a man he met in prison who gave him extra food from the canteen. The old prison friend wants help on a job robbing the woman who still hands out physical pay-packets to workers at a local factory, but Inui turns him down stating that he’s still on parole and it’s too risky though secretly plotting to have Osamu do the job on his own. Predictably, it all goes wrong and Osamu ends up losing an arm only for Koyuki to drag him to a backstreet doctor who first refuses to help but then apparently experiments on him with a drug he’s researching into regenerative health with the consequence that Osamu’s arm grows back but as a monstrous lump of throbbing grey muscle that he is no longer able to fully control. At moments of high emotion, the arm takes him over and he’s transformed into a mindless, thrashing beast to the extent that Koyuki has to chain him to the wall to ensure her own safety.

Having bonded in their shared sense of subjugation, they once again attempt to change by living a more normal life in a small town by the sea. But even here, Osamu is rejected in part because of the arm itself, which he keeps disguised in bandages and a sling as if it were broken, and otherwise because of his secrecy about it which sees him fired by the kindly older gentleman running a factory where Osamu found temporary employment. Koyuki becomes pregnant, but financial pressures and the lingering anxiety about what kind of child this world might produce eats away at them. Osamu isn’t sure if the baby’s his or Inui’s nor which of those two options is better given that the child might inherit whatever’s infected his arm, while Koyuki is no longer certain about the viability of raising a child in their present circumstances. Both from single-parent families, they lamented that neither of them had the experience of being taken to the beach by their parents which seems to be the idyllic picture of a carefree childhood they’re trying to recapture.

But still they find themselves hounded and pursued, this time by a shady businessman who doesn’t want cure Osamu but to exploit him by ripping off his arm and using the technology for his own nefarious ends. The remorseful doctor also wants a tissue sample, but promises a salve in return that would at least subdue his violent impulses and allow him to live a more normal life. The implication is, however, that the only way Osamu can have the semblance of a happy family is by wilfully sacrificing himself and accepting that he has no place within in it. Condemned by his monstrousness to the edges of the frame, he accepts his liminality rather than railing against it and resigns himself to self-isolation as a permanent exile from a continually unforgiving society.

The Beast Hand is released in the US on DVD and blu-ray May 13 courtesy of Cleopatra Entertainment and available from MVD.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Peg O’ My Heart (贖夢, Nick Cheung Ka-Fai, 2024)

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An insomniac taxi driver says he can’t sleep but he can’t wake up either. He finds himself plagued by bad dreams in an increasingly surreal Hong Kong that seems to exist more within the mind than the physical reality and populated by the orphaned ghosts of another era. Clearly inspired by the films of David Lynch with overt visual references to Lost Highway and Twin Peaks, Nick Cheung’s Peg O My Heart (贖夢) follows a maverick psychiatrist intent on actually treating his patients as he chases the taxi driver while in flight from his own trauma.

Dr. Man (Nicholas Cheung Ka-fai) is already in trouble for prying into the lives of his patients when his superiors, men in slick suits bickering in English, would rather he just get on with his job of prescribing pills. The first patient we see him treat is a teenage girl whose surreal dream sequence finds her on a swing in a room of blood while a giant baby doll looks on. Man notices an upturned doll’s head being used as a cup by one of her friends and begins to get a picture of what’s been going on. The apartment the girl lives in with her grandmother is cramped and grimy in the extreme despite the happiness banner on the door. The girl and her friends have taken to drugs to escape their own dissatisfying reality, but it led them to a dark place in which the boy abused the girl and left her with lasting trauma that blossomed into psychosis in much the same way’s Man’s own has. Nevertheless, in contrast to his bosses, he’s careful to remind her that she still has choices and it might not be the right time for her to have a child though he’ll help her whatever she decides.

In a strange way, it might be the taxi driver who’s responsible for her plight. In another life, Choi (Nicholas Cheung Ka-fai) was a high-flying financial analyst who could afford to give his wife a Mayfair flat on a whim, though you’d never guess it now. In those days, his hair was slicked back rather than long and wavy and his suit was finely buttoned rather than hanging loose. He wore glasses too, which he alarmingly no longer seems to do while driving. His eyes are red and puffy, his face pale like a ghost. On his return home, he and his wife have a number of strange rituals which make no kind of sense but hint at the extent that they have descended into a dream world, locked in by their guilt and the feeling that they are being tormented by a vengeful ghost. 

Then again, Choi’s heartless former colleagues describe him as being too sensitive for this line of work. They joke, a little misogynistically, that his wife was always the go-getter. Fiona (Fala Chen) was into stocks too, the pair of them playing a game of untold riches without any awareness of what it meant to gamble with other people’s money. His colleagues may have told him that’s exactly why it didn’t matter and it was silly to worry about it, but it seems Choi did worry, though the money distracted him from his moral quandary until the lack of it convinced him to betray an old friend with tragic and unforeseen consequences. 

Choi and Fiona are plagued by echoes of a single afternoon, one of sunlight and happiness that they unwittingly ruined with their insatiable greed. Dr. Man, meanwhile, says he has the same dream every night but can’t remember anything about it in the morning. That’s a contradictory statement in itself, though his loyal nurse Donna (Rebecca Zhu) doesn’t seem to have picked up on the holes in his story. In any case she introduces him to his previous boss, Vincent (Andy Lau Tak-wah), a former psychiatrist with an unexplained prosthetic arm, who has the power to enter other people’s dreams and seems to exist in more than one place at once, like the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. Exploring his dreamscape allows Man to reckon with his own trauma and subsequently learn to forgive and accept his father, though he may not, in fact, have faced himself fully or released his guilt even as he and Choi eventually share a similar fate. Are either of them awake, or still asleep? Did Man go through the mirror, or merely deeper inside it? The melancholy streets of contemporary Hong Kong take on a deathly hue trapping its traumatised denizens in an inescapable hell of guilt and regret from which they can never awake.

Trailer (English subtitles)