Sheung (Josie Ho) is interrupted in her quest for the ideal flat in Pang Ho-cheung's Dream Home.

What do you get when you combine slasher horror with Hong Kong's property woes? You get Dream Home, the latest by the increasingly prolific Pang Ho-cheung (Exodus, Isabella), perhaps Hong Kong's most clued-in filmmaker. Pang has proved time and again that fewer writer-directors have as strong a sense of the city's pulse. In Love in a Puff he constructed a romance around the still fresh anti-smoking laws. Before that he made Asia's porn industry fodder for comedy in A/V. He's also managed to tackle every genre known to mankind. Yes. Mankind. Because Pang also has no time for what's politically correct. He's only concerned with what is.

Dream Home hinges on the conceit that owning a flat is nearly out of reach for many Hongkongers. The film's opening scroll states an average 600 square foot flat runs upwards of $7 million, which is debatable, but it simply sets the tone for the gruesome shenanigans to come.

It's 2007 and housing prices are soaring. Sheung (Josie Ho) is a dutiful daughter and hard-worker saddled with a married, loser boyfriend (Eason Chan at his dorkiest) and few housing prospects. She has her eyes on a flat in the prime Victoria Bay development and is willing to get a unit there by any means necessary. She opts to drive the prices down into her budget range by making it an undesirable address. Cue the kitchen knife and a whole lot of blood and guts - and one death by vacuum storage bag.

Pang and cinematographer Yu Lik-wai (who's worked on most of Jia Zhangke's films) start quickly, setting a suitably creepy tone and signaling their intentions to keep the gross-out factor high. Using a flashback format keeps the nastiness to short spurts (no pun intended), but they manage to concoct several considerable "OMG!" moments that are simultaneously funny and shocking. Every time a viewer's Hollywood-trained brain thinks there's no way the director will go there... he goes there (pregnant women are advised to avoid this film).

Pang hits all the right notes in following the slasher conventions that fixed themselves after John Carpenter gave us the modern bogeyman in 1978's Halloween; it could be argued that Pang is giving Carpenter a shout-out by setting the major action so close to that day. It's got oversexed youths, lazy security guards, uniform cops (which equates with "dead") and everyone who gets creatively offed by Sheung "deserves" it. Jason Voorhees would be proud.

But as assured as Pang is with the material, there are narrative glitches that are more distracting than clever. The disjointed timeline gets messy at points, stemming largely from the fact that there's too much twisting within it. Tracking the innocent Sheung of the past and her slow spiral into psychosis over the course of the night of the crime is a fine idea when all the action moves in one direction (that being forward). Jumping around in the past muddles Sheung's progress as well as her goals. Fortunately, Ho is game and turns in a surprisingly nuanced, recognizable performance as the somewhat conflicted Sheung (since it's clear she doesn't really have the stomach for homicide) and she keeps the film centered when it appears it may go off the rails.

Dream Home isn't perfect but Pang should be admired for using cinema as a tool for saying something about the world right now. Hong Kong is as much a character as Sheung is, and it's refreshing to see a local artist (and man, is this local) actually using it as an element that defines the people living in it. But after this? I'm not even thinking about apartment hunting.

Dream Home opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

Movie Review

(HK Edition 05/15/2010 page2)