Shockingly violent and rooted in social issues, Pang Ho-cheung’s hot-topic slasher lunges for the jugular in an attack on the city’s overinflated property-development scene and public ills surrounding it. The grisly mood is established pre-credits as a young woman slips into a classy housing block, garrotes security a guard amid sprays of blood, kills the CCTV system and heads upstairs.
Meet Cheng Lai-sheung (Josie Ho), a local girl who grew up across the road from where the towers of No. 1 Victoria Bay now stand. In 1990s flashbacks we see the district’s community being torn apart when hired thugs force out neighbours ahead of redevelopment projects, and viewers watch on as Cheng’s dad suffers from construction-related illness and grandpa laments the end of nearby waterfront for land reclamation. Yet even with all this in her past, personal reasons mean Cheng is now dead set on buying an pricey harbour-view home in the modern estate, and she’ll do anything she can to snag the property of her dreams.
Intercut with Cheng’s backstory is a procession of gory confrontations, unfolding mostly unexplained as she works her way through different apartments. Sure to be the main talking point on Dream Home’s coming cinema release, the killings are brutal and disturbing in their range of victims. Cheng is seen cutting down residents and visitors indiscriminately, and uses the most ghastly means to get the job done. When an eyeball is poked out, say, it’s done by screwdriver from the back of the head. And scenes of slaughter in a playboy pad manage to connect dark comedy with an array of gruesome endings.
It’s radical cinema, and as Pang and co-writers Derek Tsang and Jimmy Wan make clear, it’s one based on social malaise and political concerns - something all too rare in today’s Hong Kong film scene. Dream Home’s terror is set largely against late 2007’s skyrocketing property prices, as would-be home owners struggle to buy small, increasingly expensive flats while their salaries are stuck somewhere around pre-financial crisis levels. (In early 2010, things are much the same.) The picture speaks to a sense of helplessness in the face of real estate cartels, widely perceived government-developer collusion and demolitions of culturally significant city sights. Urban-planning issues more than ever are triggering protests, and that too is represented as Cheng and her dad watch 2007 news reports on TV. It’s not the first time Pang has followed social concerns on-screen (his 2001 feature debut even opens with a man suicidal over property woes), and other hallmarks of his filmography lurk in Dream Home too, whether in black humour or authentic small talk or looking back on recent history’s changes.
Dream Home is also a meticulously crafted picture. Three different apartments, the corridors and the guard station were painstakingly built in studio sets (surely no landlord would have wanted this shot in their premises). Yu Lik-wai, the longtime DP for Jia Zhangke, provides discreet roving camerawork and the score and soundscapes by Italian Gabriele Roberto (Exodus, Memories Of Matsuko) are far above the Hong Kong cinema norm. Action directors Chin Kar-lok and Wong Wai-fai, usually at work on spectaculars like Fire Of Conscience, meanwhile apply their skills to more intimate surrounds. Actress-producer Josie Ho tackles her arduous central performance with clear determination as she sets about her hideous acts, and rounding out the cast are respected veteran character actors alongside regulars from the Pang Ho-cheung film universe. Dream Home may well inhabit the slasher genre, but this cinema shocker aims to exceed mere B-grade thrills.
Tim Youngs