Dream home

Edmond Pang Ho-cheung has a good track record as one of Hong Kong's more inventive directors, and his latest movie earned new appreciation for its leading actress and main producer, Josie Ho. She's one of Stanley Ho's daughters, which makes the theme of Dream Home highly ironic: this is a satirical murder story bloodily highlighting the inflationary horror of Hong Kong's property market.

Media reports suggest that Ho forced Pang to make his scenario even gorier, in order to intensify her movie's marketability. What was produced was a slasher movie that deserves to become a classic in its genre.

Utilising an ever-changing time-frame, Pang builds a back history of hardship, family pressures, slum housing, governmental collusion with property developers, economic lawlessness and marital infidelity to account for the calculated bloody-mindedness of a single woman (Ho) with two jobs and an obsession about buying an apartment with a harbour view.

She'd finally raised sufficient deposit cash, by allowing her terminally ill father to die, at a time when the Hang Seng Index reached its 2007 peak; the apartment sellers jacked up its selling price beyond her funding level. In one evening visit to the apartment building, Ho's calmly amoral character kills 10 people and a pregnant woman in a successful effort to decrease the building's property values overnight.

The side stories for some of them are further condemnations of Hong Kong society at varying levels, and their means of death are imaginative black cinema. The shockingly credible SFX (produced by an experienced Thai team) include a disemboweled punk smoking, a fully broken neck, a lesbian prostitute with a bed strut in her mouth, and a severed penis. Murder weapons such as a screwdriver, hammer, golf club and vacuum-packaging are derived from the side stories, adding to an audience's fascination with a movie presenting Hong Kong cityscapes with beautifully arranged lighting effects and subtle music (Italian composer Gabriele Roberto, who'd worked for Pang on Exodus in 2007).

Several well-known Hong Kong actors play cameos, but the only real character is Ho's determined workaholic. In this movie, she wasn't afraid to show her age, fleshy chin and an independent spirit that should have given her property magnate father sleepless nights. Pang's script, opening review of scandalous property prices, and post-production statement (on the DVD) comprise a bloody assault on his home city's major driving force.

There's an unexpected irony for Pang in the manic rebound of property prices in 2010, making the per-foot prices of 2008 now seem like relative bargains. I suspect there's another irony lying behind the artful front credits, when the floor plan of a vast apartment includes Portuguese translations; it would be truly ironic justice if they're the plans of a Ho family palace.