Film review: Port of Call - Philip Yung’s true crime drama doubles as a mesmerising human story

A grisly murder in April 2008 provides the background for Philip Yung Tsz-kwong’s ambitiously humanistic third feature. While the film critic-turned writer-director’s first two films, Glamorous Youth (2009) and May We Chat (2013), were both underrated portraits of alienation and loneliness, Port of Call, which charts similar predicaments, is an admirably non-mainstream – and surpassingly melancholy – effort that should prove the ticket for Yung to join the league of Hong Kong’s most distinctive filmmakers.

A slow-burning true crime story that only indulges its sensationalistic premise in brief doses, the film weaves a complex web of psychological turmoil around many of its intriguingly sketched characters, including the victim. Played by new actress Jessie Li with both emotional nuance and a candid touch of opaqueness, the high-school outcast turned prostitute Wang Jiamei isn’t so much a narrative device as she is the centre of an acutely poignant case of disaffected – and ultimately wasted – youth.

A Dongguan-raised girl who saw her parents divorce before joining her mother (Elaine Jin Yan-ling) and elder sister in Hong Kong much later, Jiamei sees her modelling dreams evaporate and begins working as a call girl until she is murdered and dismembered by a new client, Ting Tsz-chung (indie musician and theatre actor Michael Ning in a Golden Horse award-winning debut). On the case is Chong (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing), a veteran cop who’s intensely curious about the quirks of human nature.

As the film leaps back and forth in time, among characters, and across a hauntingly diverse spectrum of emotions, the audience is privy to some of the innermost concerns of the characters, but largely deprived of the conventional comfort of solving a criminal case. For the mystery here is less related to the identity and method of the murderer, which are both explicit, than it is a seething sense of existential misgiving, possibly shared by Jiamei and Tsz-chung, and palpably felt by Chong.