Dream On
Actor Nick Cheung returns to the director’s chair after a six-year hiatus.
Peg o’ My Heart
Director: Nick Cheung • Writers: Ryan Ling, Nick Cheung
Starring: Nick Cheung, Terrance Lau, Fala Chen, Rebecca Zhu
Hong Kong • 1hr 37mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 27 • IIB
Grade: B-
Veteran actor Nick Cheung Ka-fai has finally gotten back behind the camera. He threw his hat into the director’s ring with Hungry Ghost Ritual, Keeper of Darkness and The Trough, all between 2014 and 2018. He’s been radio silent since, but in his fourth feature, Peg O’ My Heart | 贖夢, he’s taken a few leaps forward with his visual storytelling and technical acumen, so credit where it’s due. But he’s yet to find a narrative tone and, well, a narrative to match. Ritual was a messy possession thriller with a failed bizniz dude coming home to his dad’s Cantonese opera troupe. Darkness was a messy but starry creature thriller about a shady exorcist who summons some demons and goes viral. The Trough was a messy cop thriller (progress!) about an honest cop fighting corruption during a kidnapping investigation. The plot beats were familiar, but each had a heightened aesthetic that helped with those familiar plots, and each hinted at Cheung’s capacity to conjure unsettling, creative images.
So this time around, Peg O’ My Heart is – yep, you guessed it – a messy psychological thriller about some sort of finance bro, Choi San-keung (Cheung), who had a mental break after a disastrous (I’m guessing) 2008 crash and bankruptcy and now drives a taxi (badly) around Hong Kong at night while his equally shattered wife, Fiona (Fala Chen Fa-la, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) waits for him at home. Every so often Fiona breaks out of their modest flat and endures the contempt of the neighbourhood kids. Elsewhere, gently unorthodox psychiatrist Dr Man (Terrance Lau Chun-him) is committed to getting to the true root of his patients’ psychoses and neuroses – we see him go above and beyond with a pregnant teen (Natalie Hsu Yan-yi) – much to the chagrin of his hospital superiors. Man meets Choi one night when he hails his cab, and later when a car wreck lands Choi in the hospital for an evaluation under Man’s care.
The hell kind of hospital…
The story really starts after Man and Choi meet at the hospital, where Man determines Choi struggles to separate fantasy from reality, and is fighting what he sees as literal demons, frequently in the shape of an old friend, Chi (Julius Brian Siswojo). Whatever Choi’s distress is, it seems to rub off on Man, who starts having his own nightmares, perhaps memories, of a traumatic childhood with a violent father (Ben Yuen Foo-wah), and possibly a skeleton or two of his own.
There’s an interesting nugget at the heart of Peg, chiefly one about what happens when our caregivers need care of their own, alongside an exploration of how we compartmentalise guilt and trauma. Everyone has their baggage, and as Man’s increasingly impacts his work, it begs the question of whether he should even be trying to help Choi. Can he? All that said, Cheung demonstrates better control over his brand of visual flair in his dream imagery, getting a huge bump from DOP Jason Kwan Chi-yiu (Aberdeen, I Did It My Way). The dark corners and dingy hallways the mentally broken Fiona exists in have a palpable sense of neglect to them that sticks with you, and when Fiona wanders the street imagining her and Choi waltzing away to the strains of the 1913 Alfred Bryan and Fred Fisher title song it’s a jarring WTF? moment, made even more jarring when Fiona snaps back to reality. Man’s slow re-immersion into his abusive past is rendered in inky backgrounds, mixed speeds and saturated colour and does what movies are supposed to: Show, not tell.
But then there’s that odd flatness to the sound; no urban office or home is quite so silent, and this isn’t unique to Peg. It seems first time filmmakers and indies are sound mixing the life out of their ambient soundtracks, and it’s anyone’s guess as to why this trend has suddenly emerged. Chances are high, however, that it has something to do with streaming. Sound is one thing, but what nearly sinks Peg completely is Cheung and co-writer Ryan Ling Wai-Chun’s (The Moon Thieves) reliance on hoary, earnest story points and the requisite redemption or atonement arcs that go with their spin on a cautionary tale of greed and hubris. Oh, the guilt! The shame! The humanity! It’s timely: capitalists are the new über-villain, but Peg’s melodrama undoes a great deal of the visual effort Cheung put in simply by being corny. A few more left-field moments like a disciplinary hearing for Man that spirals into increasingly hostile lobs of “Fuck you!” among the very proper medical hot shots wouldn’t have hurt. Peg O’ My Heart is one of those psycho-thrillers heavily indebted to Se7en and that scratchy, random barrage of disturbing images to start that ultimately reveal very little about the characters. Peg comes with a clever and arresting language – but the wrong dictionary to tell us what we’re looking for.