A blood-soaked date with destiny

The Hong Kong International Film Festival opened Thursday with a grisly swath of Hong Kong noir. Soi Cheang’s Mad Fate begins — appropriately enough — in a cemetery. A frantic fortune teller, the Master (Gordon Lam), fakes the death of a client in an effort to ward off an evil that is shadowing her, and thereby saves her life. He might not be very good at his job, and gets easily distracted by a thunderstorm. Needless to say, things don’t go according to plan, and the client indeed winds up dead.

Madness and fate are the opposing elements in Cheang’s latest outing — elements that, whether real or imagined, can have a significant impact on one’s life. Once again diving into the grottier, less glitzy side of Hong Kong and the people flailing in its darkest corners, Cheang and screenwriter Yau Nai-hoi (2003’s Running on Karma; 2004’s Throw Down) have crafted a grimy examination of mental health, faith, and the impact each can have on personal agency.

After predicting that psychotic food deliverer Siu-tung (boy-bandMirror’s Lokman Yeung, cast way against type), a kid with a history of violence, is on the verge of committing murder — and having so spectacularly failed his last client — the Master sets out to cure the young man’s impulses with feng shui and talismans. This is the tip of the iceberg, as there is an actual serial killer running around Causeway Bay murdering prostitutes (also returning is Cheang’s narrative reliance on violence against women). It goes without saying that whether due to destiny, chance, psychiatry or detective work, their three roads eventually intersect in a glorious, bloody clash.

Cheang reunites with his Limbo (2021) star in what could be seen as a continuation of the self-destructive obsession of Lam’s detective character in that film, this time for a more-internalized struggle with his own sanity. The plot is as twisted and confused as the minds of the Master and Siu-tung, in a way that only Yau can pull off, and which slowly but surely unwinds and resolves itself into a final moment of lucidity.

As always, Cheang masterfully exploits Hong Kong’s claustrophobic, humid spaces (Mad Fate feels sticky) to make the cityscape part of the story. The terrain drives the madness, and also provides the final clarity everyone seeks. In a change of pace, Mad Fate has moments of humor — dark humor — that feel new to Cheang’s work, and, given the seriousness of the main story, will either clang or prove a welcome respite from its perpetual misery.