Limbo

A black and white depressing nightmare from Hong Kong! Director Cheang Pou-soi already has quite a rich career and after the excellent actioner Kill Zone 2 with Tony Jaa, he tries a dark crime drama with the essence of Fincher's Se7en that over into exploitation, and it's a depressing film for the strong-minded. For me, anyway! A veteran and a newcomer join forces to catch a maniacal serial killer who is brutally murdering young women on the streets of Hong Kong with a hand-cutting fetish. A woman who caused the death of the veteran's wife shows up and offers to help, but not everything goes as planned. The black and white format surprisingly is not a problem at all, it has a bit of an artsy feel, but the tone is darker and definitely more shocking. It's a two hour show of violence, humiliation against women, dead bodies and filth that makes Hong Kong a downright Sin City. There is one downright brutal knife action sequence that gave me a boner, and the film doesn't let the viewer breathe, throwing one raw scene after another. The killer himself is disgustingly sleazy and his lair is a downright disgusting place that reeked of death all the way to my living room. The atmosphere is awesome and the denouement is also interesting. This is what I call proper, gritty, raw, bleak and cold crime drama that wipes its ass with everything I've had the pleasure of seeing in the genre in recent years. Story 4/5, Action 3/5, Humor 0/5, Violence 4/5, Fun 4/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 4/5, Atmosphere 4/5, Suspense 4/5, Emotion 4/5, Actors 4/5. 8/10. (2021-10-07)

Infantile gloomy noir crime story that justifies itself to me through how cute it is in its grumpiness, dirtiness, and violence. Right from the scene where police investigators go through dozens of trash bags wearing suits with ties. The dirt of Hong Kong is omnipresent here, but it feels oddly artificial, unnatural, much like most of the imagery. The beautiful wide-angle shots of the intricate cityscape are not lacking breathtaking views of the urban jungle but it doesn't look like a real place at all, often resembling a benchmark test for the black and white edition of Cyberpunk 2077 (or the French animated film Renaissance). In that regard, the story is presented in a laconic manner, leading us through visuals, character actions, and setting, culminating in a moment when it combines all these attributes into a chase between one of the heroines and the members of a street gang through shabby shacks and dirty alleys. Up the stairs, to the right, through the wet corridor, into a small apartment, passing through the kitchen, locking themselves in the bathroom, climbing out the window, being pushed again from the first floor into the street, defending themselves against the gang with a kitchen knife amidst piles of garbage and broken cars. Fantasy. I have a strangely ambivalent feeling about one storyline where a character, a petty street thief, tries to atone for accidentally killing the protagonist's wife, undergoing an incredible ordeal of violence, including brutal rape, to eventually obtain forgiveness. Cya Liu goes through some real intense stuff there, the more I watch, the harder it gets as, instead of miraculously turning into a vengeful warrior woman as in American films, she becomes more fragile and exhausted with each step, yet still indomitable. It's a weird feeling because I've grown accustomed to this film behavior towards female characters, which is essentially legitimized here. (2024-04-28)