REVIEW: Shadows (2023)
This one has taken a long time to release, but finally after a three-year wait, it’s out!
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A Hong Kong thriller that promises an element of horror, an all star cast and directed by a man more comfortable with serialised episodes than full movies – is this the movie package I was looking for?
PLOT
A psychologist is called by the police to help determine the mental statue of a man who just killed his family and then attempted suicide. Her unique ability of being able to enter a person’s subconscious mind leads her to discover he was being treated by another psychologist whose patient list seems to contain quite a few disturbed clients who are also suspected of murder.
Alongside a police detective whose methods skirt the boundaries of the law, they investigate him and his clients until a brutal part of her past is revealed, forcing her to face a very uncomfortable truth, and leading the detective to question her motives.
TALKING POINTS
This was one of the movies that was delayed due to COVID, coincidentally alongside Warriors of Future of which the movies have a few links together. Both are from One Cool Pictures, Louis Koo’s production house, and both feature Philip Keung and Tse Kwan-Ho in supporting roles. Philip is playing a character you’ve seen him play dozens of times before, the gruff no nonsense police officer – like in A Witness Out Of The Blue or Shock Wave 2, he is good at that type of characters, and while he overdoes it a little in this film, he is well cast.
And so is Tse Kwan-Ho, or Gardner Tse, as Doctor Yan. His calm and confident character actually reminded me a lot of his performance in the recent hit A Guilty Conscience, where he plays the Government prosecutor. That was an excellent film and well worth watching if you get a chance.
But its Stephy Tang who is the main drawcard of this film – the singer turned actress with a very versatile back catalogue of movies like L Storm and My Prince Edward holds her own in the rather male dominated cast of this film. She does a great job, especially when she gets to showcase her split-personality type scene, and her delivery of the final line in this movie really sells the ending quite well, leaving a few things for the audience to interpret.
As for the movie itself, it’s quite solid. But it’s far from perfect, and the usual issues that plague Hong Kong cinema can also be found here, and that is that scriptwriting is just rather farfetched, relying more on coincidence and the audience suspending some disbelief than being ground in practicality.
For example, everything that happens is rather convenient, and that takes away the whodunnit element of the film. Everyone knows each other really well, things happen really quickly, and characters have this ability to guess what about to occur and how everyone is connected to each other. That works to a degree in an action film, but for a thriller it leads the audience to ask more questions than they should.
However, we do get a really solid film here. While predictable, it tells its story better than the movie in our recent review of Burning, and it most likely because this is a proper Hong Kong movie, with no mainland collaboration.
An outstanding element of the movie is the visuals. There is a lot of care and attention put into the CGI, which some quite horrific scenes and moments – my favourites being the creepy bathtub scene, the scene where she is inside the mind of the social worker where he is at the family dinner table and is having a conversation with himself and the excellent scene inside the mind of the elderly home worker, with its strong religious imagery. Visual wise, this movie really excels and its clear that One Cool has found an excellent effects company to work with.
What are my overall thoughts?
Overall, this movie borderlines between a 3.5 and a 4. I’d probably waver slightly more towards 3.5 due to the rather farfetched elements in the storyline that detract from the thriller vibe, but visually you’re in for a treat and that’s topped off by a handful of engaging performances.
If you’ve seen this movie, what did you think?
Genre Thriller
Director Glenn Chan
Starring Stephy Tang, Philip Keung, Tse Kwan-Ho
Original Title 殘影空間
Country of Origin Hong Kong
Release Date 23 February 2023