A busload of Hongkongers get swept up in a great swirl of unknowns in Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After, an extraordinary hybrid of comedy, horror, disaster cinema and – most unusually for Hong Kong – science fiction. The story, drawn from the web serial turned novel Lost on a Red Mini Bus to Taipo by Pizza, opens amid the late-night crowds and neon lights of downtown Kowloon, where a minibus is about to start its journey to the far-off town of Tai Po. Right from the start things aren’t quite right: first the debt-laden driver (Lam Suet) is filling in for an unfamiliar route, and a bickering couple briefly boards the bus before hopping off and stepping into an accident. And once the minibus leaves Mongkok, passes through the Lion Rock Tunnel and comes out in the New Territories, Hong Kong isn’t at all as it was.
As they motor along, the driver and his 16 passengers are mystified by the complete lack of traffic around them, and when the bus rolls into Tai Po there’s not a soul to be seen. When they go their separate ways, the extent of the weirdness becomes clear, not least to the most adventurous of the lot, Yau Tsi-chi (Wong You-nam). He heads to his empty home, then bikes back into Kowloon to find his girlfriend – only to see her home covered in dust amid a dead-silent city. Soon the passengers regroup in a cha chaan teng – a common Hong Kong-style eatery – in Tai Po to try to get a handle on what’s happened and what year it could be.
For viewers similarly perplexed as events unfold, Chan offers no easy answers in his sprawling picture. Theories come and go, and sundry details are bewildering. The Internet is up and running, yet websites aren’t being updated. A leap in time is suggested, but food still looks OK in Tai Po. When it seems there’s something contagious going round, victims are hit in outrageously different ways. And what’s up with the spooky visions Tsi-chi keeps having of fellow passenger Yuki (Janice Man)?
Yet even as the situation remains an enigma, The Midnight After makes for sensational cinema. Chan stuns with the sight of a depopulated Hong Kong, from vast stretches of empty highways to an abandoned outdoor opera house, and the lack of the city’s regular background noise is simply eerie. The Midnight After is one of several new Hong Kong films that bring up end times and apocalyptic imagery, and the material here is exceptionally striking. Seen alongside Hong Kong’s rising social and political worries over the past decade or so, as well as increasingly voiced fears that the city is losing its way, the desolation and unknown future in The Midnight After are topical stuff. Viewers are thrown related tidbits reflecting the current mood, like when a web service rejects Cantonese in favour of Putongua and echoes fears for local language and culture, and imagery of the bus riders clad in protective gear recalls earlier dark times in the SARS epidemic of 2003.
The story also tracks the changes in its diverse sample of Hongkongers as they face their dire situation and come to recognise values they may have taken for granted. Here Chan finds room for not just a cautionary message, but a sense of hope too. Indeed, The Midnight After is far from being all bleak: the playfulness that runs through Chan’s directorial work is very much in evidence, from bouncy musical cues to fun special effects to zippy one-liners - even when it’s raining blood. Holding everything together is an entertaining ensemble cast, with Wong You-nam, Lam Suet, Janice Man and Simon Yam (hamming it up as a dowdy braggart) making fine headliners. Still more memorable performances come from Sam Lee, terrific as a wild-eyed junkie, as well as Kara Hui, Chui Tien-you and Vincci Cheuk. And then there’s the newbie Jan Curious, a rock singer whose rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity manages to stand out among The Midnight After’s most bizarre highlights – no mean feat in a film as offbeat as this one.
Tim Youngs