Tycoon Wee Bak Chuan, otherwise known as Singapore's 'pineapple king', ran his empire with an iron fist. Now he's a ghost at his own wake, witnessing his two sons quarrelling over who should run the business: the younger, who has been working loyally for the company all his life, or the elder, an engineer who admits he is unsuited to the job but feels entitled to the position.
Add to this drama two inspectors looking into the mysterious circumstances of Wee's death - can it be murder? - and the dark secrets of his dysfunctional family quickly unravel, including revelations that his spinster daughter is an alcoholic, his younger son is having an affair and the elder is a closet homosexual.
So is the intrigue that drives the film, The Blue Mansion, a social and political satire about Asian society dressed up by Singaporean director Glen Goei as a whodunit potboiler.
'I wanted to address the theme of patriarchy, which is very important in Asian societies because, particularly now in the West, everybody is looking at Asian values, idealising them,' the 47-year-old Goei says, 'but that fails to look at the enormous cost that the patriarchal order has on the individual in terms of how he or she wishes to live his or her life.
'I also wanted to explore how values such as Confucianism, respect for authority and the reluctance to criticise have evolved in Asia, whether people still want to live under this model.'
Goei drew from his own experience, being the youngest of seven in a traditional family in Singapore, where at one stage all his siblings worked for their father, a real estate developer.
'Certainly these Confucian ethics that we were brought up on, about father knows best, government knows best, not questioning authority, have been with me ever since I was a child, from my education system, from my own family, from religion even, and obviously from the state itself.'