“In a crazy city, if one is to survive, he’s got to be more crazy.” according to the opening titles of Pang Ho-cheung’s surprisingly poignant slasher satire Dream Home (維多利亞壹號). In the 10 years since the handover, the average wage has increased by a measly 1% while house prices have risen by 15% in 2007 alone. Sheung’s (Josie Ho) one overriding mission in life is to buy a flat for her family to live in, but it’s clear that her struggles to become a homeowner aren’t the only pressure points in her life in an increasingly capitalistic society.
As we later discover, Sheung is set on one particular flat because the building it’s in stands on the spot where she once lived as a child before her family was pushed out by rampant gentrification. In essence, she’s just trying to take back what’s hers and restore her family’s sense of dignity and security. A flashback to her childhood reveals her father’s own insecurity in having been unable to secure a larger living space in which she and her brother could have their own rooms while her grandfather, a sailor, longed for a sea view and the sense of an expanding horizon otherwise denied to the family in a cramped Hong Kong council flat. In a touch of irony, Sheung’s father himself worked in construction building apartment blocks he couldn’t afford to live in and in the end it killed it him through exposure to asbestos and other dangerous fibres.
Sheung works at a bank but is conflicted about her job cold calling account holders to try to get them to buy into dodgy loans neatly echoing the film’s closing moments which hint at a coming economic crash precipitated by the subprime mortgage crisis which will threaten Sheung’s homeowning dream. Her friends think she’s crazy to buy a flat at all, but she’s completely fixated on repairing her broken childhood by taking back her family home and ending her displacement. Meanwhile, she’s in a dissatisfying dead end relationship with a married man which largely takes place in love hotels he sticks her with the bill for and turns up late to only to immediately fall asleep. When Sheung asks him for a loan to help pay for her father’s medical care after the insurance she got for him is voided because he never told her he’d been diagnosed with a lung complaint before she took it out, he tells her to use her deposit fund instead and give up on homeownership because only fools like her would buy in such a volatile market.
Disappointment in both her personal and professional lives continues to place a strain on Sheung’s fragile mental state that eventually tips her over the edge. Hoping to bring the apartment’s price down, she goes on a murder spree in the building killing it seems partly out of resentment and otherwise pure practicality. There is irony here too, in that she kills her victims with the weapons of their privilege. A cheating husband who comes home unexpectedly after lying to his wife that he’s gone golfing but was actually with his mistress is whacked on the head with a golf club while an obnoxious stoner kid is stabbed in the neck with his bong. Sheung murders a Filipina helper, but also the snooty middle-class woman who employed her by using the vacuum pack machine the helper had been using on her behalf. One might ask if she really needed to kill the helper or the pair of Mainland sex workers in the next apartment, but when it comes to devaluing property prices “massacre” sounds much better than “killing” and so it’s the more the merrier.
In the end, it’s this city that’s driven her out of her mind with its status-obsessed consumerism and constant sense of impossibility. After her killing spree, she doesn’t even seem very conflicted about selling dodgy loans to vulnerable people not so different from herself while she was so desperately trying to get approval on a mortgage there was no way she could afford despite working a series of other part-time jobs including one selling designer handbags to the kind of wealthy women she resents. Her dream apartment has a view quite literally to kill for, though there’s a sense that Sheung’s dream will always be futile with the same motivations that brought her here leading to the mortgage crisis and economic shock that could eventually take it from her. Bloody, gory, and at times sickeningly violent Pang’s satirical horror show paints contemporary capitalism as the real villain and even in its dark humour reserves its sympathies for the wounded Sheung pushed to breaking point by a pressure cooker society.
Dream Home available to stream in the UK until 30th June as part of this year’s Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season.
International trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 