The piece of movie dialogue that dominated the 2024 Hong Kong pop culture zeitgeist came from, naturally, the most popular local film of the year. In one of the most emotional scenes of Anselm Chan’s The Last Dance, protagonist Dominic (Dayo Wong) – a former wedding planner who goes into the funeral business to make ends meet – explains to Taoist priest Master Man (Michael Hui) that the popular Taoist funeral ritual of Breaking Hell’s Gates doesn’t only liberate the souls of the dead, it liberates the souls of the living as well. “There are a lot of troubled souls,” Dominic says. “Living can be hell.”
If you live in Hong Kong, it’s not hard to imagine why this sentiment would resonate so much with the masses. Regardless of political leaning, life was not easy in Hong Kong in 2024. Global economic turmoil and widespread inflation drove Hong Kong consumers to tighten their purse strings. Many ended up flocking to the neighbouring mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen for recreational spending, leading to shuttered businesses across the city. However, it wasn’t just the food and beverage industry that was hit hard: consumer spending dipped, meaning nearly every consumer-facing industry was hit, including the film industry. Box office takings continue to fall, and the city saw nine cinemas shut down in 2024 (though one reopened under a new operator later). Actor and One Cool Film production company founder Louis Koo told the media that the film industry is facing a “harsh winter” in 2025.
That’s why, despite the industry having been best known for visceral thrills provided through its genre films, the film that ended up finding the biggest audience in 2024 was a sombre drama that gave viewers a good cry. In the middle of a well-publicised box office slump, The Last Dance shattered box office records and became the highest-grossing Hong Kong film of all time. The Last Dance was a true four-quadrant film that had something to trigger emotional responses from every demographic in Hong Kong. It covered economic hardship, the inevitability of mortality, familial discord, the ongoing emigration wave, and the absurdity of generational misogyny. Of course, casting two of the industry’s best-known comedy actors – Michael Hui and Dayo Wong – in their most dramatic roles yet didn’t hurt its commercial chances, either.
Another bleak film that became a surprise hit was Papa, Philip Yung’s follow-up to his long-delayed big-budget epic Where the Wind Blows. A much more modest production than his previous film, Papa is a pseudo-fictional story based on a real-life double murder in 2010, which involved a schizophrenic teenager murdering his mother and younger sister. In a career-best performance, Sean Lau plays a father who has the unfortunate coincidence of being the family member of both the victims and the murderer. Despite the grim subject matter, audiences were drawn to Lau’s critically acclaimed performance and Yung’s unique nonlinear storytelling style, making Papa one of 2024’s highest-grossing local films.
Though less commercially successful, Ray Yeung’s All Shall Be Well was notable for taking a different approach to a ripped-from-the-headlines issue. A quietly incendiary drama that exposes the lack of legal protection for same-sex partnerships, the Berlinale Teddy Award winner follows a woman who risks losing her home when her same-sex partner dies without leaving a will. As he did with his previous film Suk Suk, Yeung takes a calm, observational approach to the characters. Without casting judgement or vilifying his characters, Yeung seeks to show every side of the debate and ends on a note of liberation rather than resentment. Both Papa and All Shall Be Well’s relatively optimistic approaches to real-life tragedies prove that films tackling serious issues don’t always have to be grim.
But that’s not to say that traditional genre thrills no longer appeal to Hong Kong audiences. For most commercial films these days, it just takes the right packaging. Using an intriguing real-life legal debacle that saw innocent people convicted of drug trafficking because they naively lent their addresses out to drug dealers, Donnie Yen’s The Prosecutor defies expectations to deliver a surprisingly gripping legal drama that also happens to start and end with impressive fight scenes.
Both directing and starring in the film (he passed action choreography duties to longtime collaborator Ouchi Takahito), Yen still gets to do what he does best – kicking ass without pausing to take any names – but he also stretches his acting chops as an idealistic prosecutor who goes up against his own bosses to free an innocent young man from wrongful prosecution. In post-National Security Law Hong Kong, The Prosecutor’s criticisms of the Hong Kong legal system, however gentle they may be, already feel daring by today’s standards.
The other record-shattering Hong Kong blockbuster of 2024, Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, managed to draw in audiences with a more traditional sales pitch: a perfectly balanced mix of old-school martial arts spectacle, an impressive display of classic production design magic and computer-generated wizardry, nostalgia for old Hong Kong, and a dash of timeless bromance to boot.
The big-budget adaptation of a popular novel and its subsequent comic book, Cheang’s action drama tells a story of brotherhood that unfolds in the infamous Kowloon Walled City, a slum notorious for being plagued by crime and lawlessness for its last three decades of existence. However, Cheang’s film chooses instead to highlight the camaraderie inside the community, depicting the Walled City as a place that is mostly occupied by normal folks who just want to make a living, and neighbours who will always stand united against outside invaders.
While attention for the film overseas largely focused on the visceral action sequences (choreographed by Tanigaki Kenji, another longtime Donnie Yen collaborator), Hong Kong audiences largely focused on nostalgia for the Kowloon Walled City, and the film turned its young male cast – Raymond Lam, Philip Ng, Terrence Lau, Tony Wu and German Cheung – into idols. However, even more hotly debated among Hongkongers was whether the film’s poster slogan – “Can’t leave it, can’t stay inside it” – referred to more than just the Kowloon Walled City.
Equally impressive in spectacle, but even more sombre in tone, was Anthony Pun’s disaster thriller Cesium Fallout. Depicting an impending radioactive disaster that breaks out during a fire in a recycling yard, the film moves back and forth between the disaster scene, where firefighters battle the blaze and try to locate the radioactive material it spreads across the city, and Government House, where a battle of words breaks out between an environmental pollution expert (Andy Lau) and an ambitious bureaucrat (Karen Mok). Though the large-scale disaster scenes are impressive from a production standpoint, the involving story’s scenes of mass evacuations, mentions of looming catastrophes, and a bleak coda showing leaked radiation’s devastating effect on the characters will more likely leave audiences in tears than thrilled.
Still one of Hong Kong’s hardest-working filmmakers, Herman Yau had two summer releases that offered more traditional escapist thrills. Crisis Negotiators, a fairly faithful remake of Hollywood thriller The Negotiator, sees Yau at his best as a craftsman of fast-paced and well-produced entertainment. Seeing Sean Lau and Francis Ng face off in a high-stakes battle of wits will certainly inspire long-time Hong Kong cinema buffs to yearn for the old days, when Hong Kong used to churn out mid-budget genre films like this on a monthly basis.
Last year, Yau told me in his interview for Far East Film that Customs Frontline was a response to a new reality for the cops-and-robbers film genre. Realising that audiences may be less keen to see traditional stories about police officers after the 2019 protests, Yau and his producers tried to apply action genre tropes to another law enforcement service. However, it turned out Hong Kong audiences were not exactly ready to see customs agents do battle against arms smugglers on Victoria Harbour with guns blazing, resulting in largely negative reviews for the film.
Despite the controversy surrounding Mabel Cheung’s award-winning To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self, which in 2023 was pulled from screenings when a participant in the documentary said she had not been told the film would be screened to the public, last year turned out to be very good for local documentaries. Wong Siu-pong’s Obedience, a quiet observational documentary about the neighbourhood of Hung Hom (also where much of The Last Dance is set), was selected for International Film Festival Rotterdam and enjoyed a strong limited release in Hong Kong. Winter Chants, Jessey Tsang’s latest instalment in her series of documentaries about her home village of Ho Chung, was chosen as one of the year’s Recommended Films by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society.
On the commercial side, popular YouTube channel Trial and Error (co-founded by actor and previous FEFF guest Neo Yau) found solid commercial success with their first feature film, the documentary Once Upon a Time in HKDSE. Re-edited and expanded from a series of videos about one student’s painstaking effort to pass the compulsory Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination, the William Chang-edited film drew praise from local audiences for accurately capturing the immense pressure of having a single standardised examination determining a student’s future. However, the film has been overshadowed by the legal troubles faced by its subject Hong Tang, who was convicted of shoplifting soon after the film’s release.
Surprisingly, the breakout Hong Kong documentary of 2024 is a sports film about an extraordinary trail-running race. The feature directorial debut of outdoor videographer Robin Lee, Four Trails is an immensely entertaining documentary about the 2021 edition of the Hong Kong Four Trails Ultra Challenge, a gruelling ultramarathon that sees runners cover 298 kilometres of Hong Kong’s mountain trails in under 80 hours. Employing aerial drone footage of the course, interviews with the runners, and comprehensive on-the-ground footage of the race, the film impressed Hong Kong audiences who were enraptured by both the athletic spirit on display and the film’s jaw-dropping views of Hong Kong from its mountains. The film earned Lee nominations for both Best New Director and Best Editing at the Hong Kong Film Awards, a rare feat for a documentary, and it is now one of the highest-grossing Hong Kong documentaries of all time.
While new Hong Kong directors in recent years have used their debuts to tackle heavier, socially relevant topics, the class of 2024 offered works that cover a wider range of genres, as shown by this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards for Best New Director.
The most commercially successful among them is Love Lies, a project by longtime screenwriter Ho Miu-ki (Naked Ambition 2, La Comédie humaine) that won its funding under the government-run First Feature Film Initiative. The unconventional romantic comedy stars Sandra Ng as a divorced OB-GYN who falls victim to an online scam run by a young first-time con artist (pop star Michael Cheung). Taking a more whimsical approach that leans closer towards classical Hollywood romcom filmmakers like Nancy Meyers or Garry Marshall, or 1980s Hong Kong middle-class-oriented comedies by the likes of D&B, Ho’s film boasts great performances by its cast and an incisive script co-written by Ho and her mentor, veteran filmmaker Chan Hing-ka.
Another longtime screenwriter who leaned towards more commercial sensibilities is Jill Leung, whose directorial debut Last Song for You is a poignant tale about a washed-up musician (Ekin Cheng) who recalls his late first love (Cecilia Choi) while travelling to Japan with her daughter (Natalie Hsu). Not only does the film show a gentler side of Leung – better known for co-writing action films such as Paradox and Ip Man 3 – it also boasts a star-making performance by newcomer Natalie Hsu, who nabbed a Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actress nomination with only her first starring role.
There’s also Stuntman, another First Feature Film Initiative project that marks the directorial debut of actors, stuntmen and siblings Albert and Herbert Leung. With legendary action director Stephen Tung starring as a disgraced stuntman who returns to the industry for one last hurrah, the film is both a loving tribute to Hong Kong action cinema of yesteryear and a criticism of the blatant disregard for safety that happened during the making of those films. Last but not least, there’s Thomas Lee and Daniel Ho’s An Abandoned Team, a heartwarming drama about a grumpy old man (Lawrence Cheng) whose cold heart is softened when he takes in a stray dog and starts helping out at his village’s animal shelter. Unsurprisingly, the film teaches its viewers to value our canine friends by the time it reaches its happy ending.
Stuntman very much reflects the dilemma facing Hong Kong cinema today. Should it keep celebrating and embracing its past glories, or should it strive to reinvent itself for a new generation? It may be a dilemma that will never be solved, but it is resulting in an astonishing diverse range of stories in Hong Kong, as proven by the films of 2024. Yes, the Hong Kong film industry may indeed be facing, in the words of Mr Koo, a “harsh winter”, but perhaps we can take a lesson from the Norwegians: When facing bad weather, prepare better clothing.
Kevin Ma