When the Chengs move into a new apartment, their happy family unit is split apart by the building’s secret resident. An insane and horribly disfigured woman (Karena Lam) has been secretly crawling through the tower block’s ducts, chutes and lift shafts, and when she spots the Chengs’ son Chi-lo (Tam Chun-ho), she kidnaps him before his mother’s eyes. With the police offering no help and her husband soon hospitalised, May Cheng (Shu Qi) must go it alone to get back the child she only days earlier had promised she would never abandon.
Released in Hong Kong cinemas as a Halloween movie, Home Sweet Home indeed offers viewers horror material in the opening reels. Yet while the concept of an unknown terror figure in a high-rise building could make for quite a frightfest, director Soi Cheang instead diverts the plot into another direction to craft a fraught cat-and-mouse thriller within a building’s tightly confined spaces. Family love drives both Mrs Cheng and the kidnapper alike as the former’s nerve-wracking search for her child grows increasingly desperate, and flashbacks explain the sorry past of the building’s secret tenant.
Karena Lam’s role as the mystery woman required a major transformation - extensive makeup applied convincing-looking scars, burns and other damage to her skin and teeth - but Cheang affords her enough of a history to not just paint her as an ogre. Shu Qi pulls out all stops for her performance as the frantic mother, covering plenty of ground in search of her missing son, and child actor Tam Chun-ho comes across as positively terrified at times.