Deliver Me
It’s one step forward one step back for ‘It Remains’ director Kelvin Shum.
Deliverance
Director: Kelvin Shum • Writer: Shum Sheung-chit
Starring: Summer Chan, Simon Yam, Ron Ng, Justin Cheung, Tim Wong, Kenneth Tsang, Carrie Ng
Hong Kong • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong January 18 • IIB
Grade: C-
Can someone please tell my why the fuck every single pregnancy in an Asian horror-thriller has to be a life-threatening condition? Do people realise women have been having babies for 140,000 years, mostly without issue? Is this supposed to be succour to rape plots or something? Hey, no one’s suggesting pregnancy can’t come with complications but come on. The rate isn’t nearly, oh, 100%.
Admittedly that’s the least of the problems in Kelvin Shum Ka-yin’s Deliverance | 源生罪, made before the imperfect, but superior It Remains but released now, probably for fear it would leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth causing them to ignore the other film. Shum once again proves he has an eye for visual storytelling – Deliverance is thickly atmospheric and polished, likely on a tight budget – but it’s also a paper thin psychological thriller, whose core mystery is no mystery at all for anyone who’s seen, oh, say, seven films. Revolving around three brothers and their baby sister dealing with a secret relating to their mother’s (way, way, way underused Carrie Ng Ka-Lai) death, the story is ostensibly about the fragility of memory and how long lost truths are sometimes best left buried. Sadly its ludicrous nature gets in its own way and just leaves you with a big WTF? Really. Someone please tell me what the hell happened here.
Careful, she’s pregnant
Deliverance starts with eldest brother Joseph (Simon Yam Tat-Wah), evidently a bestselling celebrity psychology professor (!) hypnotising what must be his surprise sister Nicole (relative newcomer Summer Chan Tsz-huen), a terrible young doctor who’s returned to Hong Kong after years away. I say surprise sister because given the age gap between the two Nicole would have been a “I wasn’t in menopause?” shock. She’s trying to figure out what happened the day their mother died 15 years earlier, when she was 12. She’s sure she was murdered and Joseph volunteers to help her find out the truth. But short-fused second brother Will (Justin Cheung Kin-Seng, My Indian Boyfriend), a bizniz dude with triad connections, and third “brother” and cop Aaron (Ron Ng Cheuk-Hai, Where the Wind Blows) think she should just leave well enough alone. That shadiness combined with conversations that go something like “Don’t you forget what I did for you 15 years ago!” and “She can never find out what happened 15 years ago!”, and repeated attempts to kidnap/murder/gaslight Nicole suggest that yes, the brothers are keeping a secret. Lest it kill her baby or something. Also? Aaron is investigating a string of murders that may or may not connect to Nicole. Sorry, it lost me in there somewhere.
The questions pile up as Deliverance chugs along, none of them the right ones and each more head-scratching than the last. The script by Shum’s brother Shum Sheung-chit piles on the twists and details without any real sense of narrative direction or thematic consistency. A random cranky neighbour seems to exist purely to tell us all to be nice to our sickly mothers. Nicole’s fragile pregnancy has no bearing on the story in the end, neither does her bond with a terminal patient (the late great Kenneth Tsang Kong). What is she learning here (answer: nothing), what does his illness mean to the central ideas? Oh, wait. Be nice to your sickly fathers too. And I know movies makes up legal proceedings all the time but the nuttiness with which Deliverance wraps up after the truth is revealed is egregious in its silliness. Y’all are going to jail, shaddup. Even still, Shum and DOP Oliver Lau Kwan-lok (Mama’s Affair) make the most of the undefined spaces – where in Hong Kong these people exist is anyone’s guess – with primary monochromes and hard shadows injecting the film with what little tension it does muster. A red-washed ferry pier (?) chase looks terrific, even if the point of it gets lost in the haze. It’s mostly a wasted effort, made even more tenuous by a bland protagonist. I’m going to give Chan, who is remarkable mostly for the sheer amount of fainting and falling into trash heaps she does, the benefit of the doubt. Ditto for Shum, who has a bright future if he can find better writers for his considerable visual stylings. — DEK