Starring: Shawn Yue Man-lok, Bonnie Xian Seli, Shi Xueyi
Director: Derek Kwok Chi-kin
Category: IIB (Cantonese)
This dark look at Hong Kong's underbelly takes the theme of undercover-cop-gone-bad in unexpected directions. In his second feature, writer-director Derek Kwok Chi-kin deals with many of the same motifs as in his debut, last year's The Pye-Dog, but with a more mature, deft touch.
Both films focus on society's outcasts in a sordid world where humanity somehow manages to break through. But The Moss piles on the ugliness to such an extent that any intended uplift is all but buried.
Set on Kowloon's mean streets, the plot (co-authored by Long Man-hong and Clement Cheng Si-kit) revolves around Jan (Shawn Yue Man-lok, above, with Bonnie Xian Seli), a cop so undercover he has lost nearly all sense of where his loyalties lie.
Equally ambiguous is his relationship with mainland prostitute Lulu (Bonnie Xian, in a finely modulated performance), a lady whose grim existence is changed by the arrival of Fa (an impressive debut by Shi Xueyi), an 11-year-old orphaned cousin who will do anything to survive.