Dream Home

Cheng Lai-sheung works two jobs in Hong Kong with one aim: to buy a flat with a view of the harbour. She has been looking at that view and saving since childhood. Property prices rise faster every year than she can save. When the sale of the flat she wants collapses at the last moment she makes a decision: bring the price of the building down. There is a way to do that, and she takes it. Edmond Pang Ho-cheung directs. Josie Ho plays Lai-sheung and is also one of the producers. The structure moves back and forth. The night of the killings runs unbroken while her past is cut into it: the family being put out of their old home, the pressure of credit at work, her father's illness. That line is the real subject and the violence stands as its consequence. The film is very bloody. The killings are detailed, long and realistic, unusually explicit even within Hong Kong horror. Its subject is housing. The narrative takes direct aim at the Hong Kong property market after 2007, and the character's derangement is presented not as a private illness but as a result. Josie Ho does not overplay anything; the character works through the murders like a list of tasks, and that is where the discomfort comes from. Who it is for: viewers who like hard Hong Kong horror and genre work with a social argument. Who it is not for: the violence is extreme, the scenes are detailed, and the shifts between humour and horror are unacceptable to some.