New Tenant
Director: Anthony Wong
Year:
1995
Rating: 6.5
The great Hong
Kong actor Anthony Wong only directed two films. This one and something called
Top Banana Club in 1996. Both keeled over at the box office and are long
forgotten by even most Hong Kong film fans. That was the end of his directorial
career and perhaps we should be grateful for that. Thankfully, he had his
acting to fall back on and has been in so many of Hong Kong's best films
over the past thirty-five years. At the time he directed these two films,
he was best known for being a villain or a psychopath in films like Hard
Boiled, Full Contact and The Untold Story with Ebola Syndrome right on the
horizon. But for his directorial debut he doesn't go down that route but
instead directs and writes a strange eccentric little film that tiptoes on
the edges of madness and horror but never really goes there and settles instead
for a charming romantic story of time travel. Maybe. We never are really
sure how much of this is real. Or the imaginings of a lunatic.
Wong - named Alan Tam in the film - is being
released after ten years in a mental hospital and his doctor (Dayo Wong)
asks him if he remembers why he was institutionalized. Wong says no. Good,
that means you are cured. Just pray to Jesus. Another patient (Lau Ching-wan)
gives him a turtle as a goodbye gift. On the outside world he finds an apartment
in a deserted building that is being torn down in three months and comes
across some of the possessions of a previous tenant. A clock. He is a writer
or had been before going into the asylum. He starts to write again but keeps
burning it up after a few pages - making me wonder if this was influenced
by The Shining. Perhaps a little but it gets whacky.
He writes "then I went to shit" and while
doing so a man (veteran actor Teddy Yip) pees on him which freaks him out
as it would any of us. He goes out to the living room and another family
is there. What the hell, Get out. No one can see him or hear him. He or his
spirit has been transported ten years into the past when this family of Yip
and his two daughters Whale (Perrie Lai) and Dolphin (Dolphin Chan) are alive
in 1984. Right around the time he was put into the asylum for something that
he doesn't remember.
He keeps jumping back and forth between
1984 and 1994 which he attributes to an old clock that starts and stops.
The daughter Dolphin it turns out can hear him, eventually can touch him
and they become buddies on the verge of more. When Whale disappears after
leaving with the downstairs professor (Lawrence Ng) they think he may have
killed her and eaten her. They investigate and it gets creepy. Is any of
this real? Is he still in the institution? Is he dead? Is it a dream? Is
he just not taking his meds? The
viewer will have to decide for themselves. Are there clues strewn along the
way that I missed? You keep thinking this will lead to why he had to go into
the hospital and maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. Very low-budget with
a set of an old building for the most part and in its off-beat way kind of
clever and charming. The man with the white face at the beginning giving
Wong a haircut is none other than Herman Yau, who had a terrific working
relationship with Wong.
