There is a scene, and this scene wouldn’t feel out of place if it had been taken from The Last Dance, where a man asks the funeral director if it would be alright to put her daughter’s body together with the mother’s body in the coffin because the girl was afraid of the dark and used to sleep with her mother. The funeral director has probably heard lots of unusual requests but he has not heard this one and replies there is no precedence for this. This scene broke my heart into so many pieces, pieces I didn’t know exist.
The premise of this movie is going to break you: Based on a true crime which happened in Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong, in 2010, 15-year-old Ming (Dylan So), without any prior obvious warning signs, picks up a meat cleaver and hacks his sister Grace (Lainey Hung) and his mother Yin (Jo Koo) to death. The father, Yuen (an excellent Sean Lau), only learns of the double murder later. Do you choose to hate your son for destroying your family or do you find a way to forgive him? This is an impossible choice and no human being should ever have to make this devastating decision.
Writer-director Philip Yung has crafted a sublime drama that interrogates a plethora of themes – grief, loss, loneliness, memories and redemption. The who, what, where, how and when are clear to anyone who bothers to read the synopsis. The only elusive element is the why. So you are held in rapt attention and furiously looking for any clues to explain the why. However, even that is never quite answered in the movie satisfactorily and even conclusively, Yung is more interested in how a father learns to live in a world utterly destroyed by his flesh and blood and hence the title of the movie.
After watching The Last Dance, I would think Dayo Wong and Michael Hui are going to be the double header in the Best Actor category for the coming Hong Kong Film Awards. But after watching Sean Lau in Papa, I am not so sure anymore. Embodying a maelstrom of feelings, Lau is a wealth of bottled emotions, all simmering to a fine boil. His everyday man mien seldom betrays a kaleidoscope of emotions belonging to a man imprisoned in a bastille of memories. Most actors and directors would go all out to press all the buttons, but Lau puts in a taciturn and finely calibrated performance that lets you feel all the pain without the outlet, while Yung maintains a tonal grip on a narrative that wants to scream melodrama and pain but never treads the common path. The end-product becomes a film that invites much thought-provoking discussions and the impact will hit you later when you least expect it.
Using an arcane 4:3 aspect ratio, which makes the squarish frame seem to squeeze Yuen into oblivion and the proceedings feel strangely intimate, Yung also flits events before and after the fateful night of murders into a potent study of elusive memories. We see all of these scenes through Yuen’s eyes and mind, and just like memories, they don’t play in chronological order. We see he might not be Father of the Year, but he is the best father he strived to be, we see his budding love story with his wife and we see his family was a barrel of joy and laughter, all this making what happened even more devastating. Papa invites us to believe there is a world where a father and his murderous son can co-exist and it has to be a world without hate, because without hate there is no need for forgiveness.
This is the first good film of 2025.
4.5 / 5
