At the end of daybreak

Movies with unlikable characters are difficult to watch, hard to enjoy. Yet, when lead characters, and the actors portraying them, are intensely credible, a movie such At The End of Daybreak holds its audience's attention and respect. The 2009 feature, aka Sham Moh, was written and directed by Malaysian-Chinese Ho Yuhang, an award-winner for Min (2003) and Sanctuary (2004).

His latest film earned Best Actress (HK Film Critics) and Best Supporting Actress (Asian Film fest and Golden Horse) awards for veteran Kara Hui Ying-hung, who'd last won a major HK acting award in 1981 for My Young Auntie, a Shawscope action movie. She plays a struggling heavy-drinking grocery keeper whose feckless husband shacked up with her younger sister, leaving her with an only child. At the age of 23, he loafs around the shop, plays pool with a pair of other young Chinese drifters (in an undefined Malaysian town) and has casual flings with local girls.

Another Hong Kong-born actor, Chui Man-kin, is a convincingly bored yet loyal son with a hardened streak, revealed at the start of the movie when he disposes of a trapped rat with boiling water. He's having a non-romantic sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl (excellently played by newcomer Ng Meng-hui). Her only sibling has been sent to study in Australia, she's a lazy student, her parents are poor role models, and she's happy to gossip about a schoolmate's pregnancy. Her parents discover she's got birth-control pills and spot a chance to squeeze money from the young man's mother by threatening to charge him with statutory rape.

Every character is a selfish egocentric and, somewhat predictably, the movie develops into a bleak example of the "accidental noir" genre, a murder story without any mysteries. It does so well in cinematic terms, dispensing with the standard surpluses of explanatory dialogue, symbolic side-plots and moody music. Instead, the camera focuses on the characters' increasing levels of tension and their inability to communicate any feelings. They don't have many, it's clear. They're simple sad humans trying to live with their empty selves.