All posts for the month April, 2018

MRS K (2016) review

Mrs K (Kara Hui) is wife to a meek gynecologist (Wu Bai) and mother to a pouty fifteen year-old (Siow Li Xuan), living a peaceful life in a quiet suburban neighborhood. But, as her lightning-fast reflexes might indicate when two hapless burglars get into her house, her past is not as benign as her present. It soon emerges that more than a decade ago she took part in a brutal heist – and her partners in crime (played by directors Fruit Chan, Kirk Wong and Dain Said) are now getting killed one after the other by Scarface (Simon Yam), a dirty cop who played both sides during the heist, and ended up with a bullet in the head from Mrs K. Driven mad by the migraines and sleep-deprivation that resulted from this injury, Sarface kidnaps Mrs K’s daughter and demands a hefty ransom.

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ASH (2017) review

In Chongqing, police detective Chen Weikun (Nie Yuan) investigates the murder of one Ma Xudong (Yang Yiwei), whose throat was cut with surgical precision in a theater. His suspicions land squarely on the victim’s stepson Xu Feng (Xin Peng), a young factory worker who visibly loathed his violent, abusive stepfather, and would have wanted to protect his mother – but both have a strong alibi. Then there’s a mysterious figure stalking the crime scene, wearing a surgical mask, but detective Chen cannot prove anything, and the case goes cold, until ten years later he spots a prominent surgeon, Wang Dong (Luo Jin) wearing the same mask – a coincidence which rekindles his will to solve the case. Yet it turns out that this is not a coincidence, as a series of flashbacks show that Wang Dong once knew Xu Feng.

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