Every so often a film comes around that takes viewers by surprise. It can do so by being devastatingly disappointing, unexpectedly fantastic, narratively innovative or simply bizarre beyond description. Murderer is a film that rests firmly in the latter category. Recalling some of the more loopy excuses for plot in films from Hong Kong in the past (albeit usually ghost or fantasy films), Murderer blends hammy acting, character archetypes and one of the most outrageous twists ever recorded on film to mixed yet not thoroughly unpleasant ends.

Murderer begins with a bang. A body plummets onto a quiet residential courtyard in Eastern District. It's a cop, Tai, in the building with his partner Ling (Aaron Kwok, as buff as ever) seemingly hot on the heels of a serial killer whose M.O. is a power drill. Up on the seventh floor, the bad guy has brained Ling, and everyone is rushed off to the hospital. Amazingly Tai survives (and you need to see the gruesome opening segment to appreciate how unlikely that is) and is the only witness to the killer's identity: Ling is suffering memory loss as a result of the blow to the head.

For the next hour, the film follows Ling and his partner Ghost (Cheung Siu-fai) as they continue the investigation as Murderer plays out as a rote police procedural. It's no big shock when all the clues start pointing toward Ling. Nonetheless Ghost sticks with him despite his own uncertainties. This part of Murderer has a vaguely claustrophobic, paranoid atmosphere that suits the story. As Ling fights to remember what happened at the apartment, he's struggling with the doubts that are surfacing about him - within himself and the police department. The shifts in his behavior at home don't help matters. Ling's wife Hazel (Ning Chang) worries that he's obsessing over the case, and is nonplussed that she and their son are bearing the brunt of his frustration.

This is where Murderer takes a turn for the decidedly bizarre - and perplexing. While we sit and wonder if Ling is in fact the killer, the killings morph into a self-fulfilling prophecy when The Big Twist (and related conspiracy) is revealed. It's impossible to explain it without giving too much away, and in this case, the bigger the surprise the better. The perplexing aspect manifests in whether or not you want to view the twist as a figment of Ling's imagination or as fact. Murderer isn't a terribly nuanced film, and so it's hard to accept a twisted psychology as the source of the drama. The other option makes easily for the most baffling film experience of the year so far. You simply have to see it to believe it.

First-time filmmaker Roy Chow has clearly studied his Hong Kong cinema history and taken healthy doses as inspiration in directing Christine To's (Jiang Hu) script. He also throws in a little Seven, as most filmmakers working in the serial killer genre do these days. Cinematographer Mark Lee (Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo) makes the most of the more atmospheric elements of urban Hong Kong; there's lots of crumbling concrete and rust. Apartment block courtyards have a palpable humidity hanging over them, and those are contrasted nicely with the hard, clear blues of the police station and the soft sunny vibe of the outlying islands. As a reflection of Ling's mindset it works for the most part. But the ideas - about past crimes coming back to haunt us and humanity's inherent capacity for evil - are overshadowed by the screenplay's outright nuttiness and the realization of it on screen.

The film swings wildly between a fairly subtle portrayal of a man trying to sort out the mystery of his life and over the top lunacy. As a man perhaps falling into madness, perhaps into despair, there's plenty of screaming and repeating the same words over and over again. But that's nothing compared to the utter meltdown of the film's second half. Kwok looks to be reveling in the chance to let loose as a psycho and break away from his dominant persona as the occasionally put-upon good guy. The rest of the cast is filler, window dressing or cannon fodder. If you got Chin Kar-lok and Josie Ho to be in your movie, give them something to do.

But you have to give Chow and To credit for damning the torpedoes and following through with the zaniness. They pull up just a bit at the conclusion, but leave enough room in the last shot to allow for the possibility of the finale we expected. There are plot holes all over the place (What is Ling's mysterious "past" the newspapers are writing about? How does Ling afford a sprawling seaside house on a cop's salary?), but that still doesn't make Murderer a bad film. It's a weird film, every bit as daring as anything out there.

Murderer opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 07/11/2009 page8)