Review | Film review: Nessun Dorma – off-key thriller falls flat

Problematic plot twists and poor script make this an unsatisfying genre exercise from director Herman Yau

Chinese language cinema

Edmund Lee

Published: 12:00pm, 26 Oct 2016

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2/5 stars

When I interviewed Herman Yau Lai-to earlier this year, the prolific director bemoaned the fact that noirish thrillers such as Nessun Dorma are a dying breed in Hong Kong for want of intelligent screenwriters. I wish he’d recognise that his frequent collaborator, Erica Li Man, isn’t necessarily one, either.

Andy Hui and Janice Man in Nessun Dorma.

For all its attempts at creating ominous atmosphere, Yau’s new film, co-scripted by Li from her own novel, is a twisty genre exercise that’s badly let down by its characters’ indecipherable motives.

Janice Man Wing-shan plays dog-rescue-charity founder Jasmine Tsang, on the brink of marrying wealthy businessman Vincent Lee (Gordon Lam Ka-tung) to feed her mother’s vanity. On a stormy night before that, however, the woman is abducted after visiting her true love Fong Mo-chit (Andy Hui Chi-on), a maths genius who suffered from autism as a child. Tsang is drugged, stripped naked and locked up for days – which, inexplicably, no one notices – and then freed the day before her wedding.

Janice Man and Gordon Lam play a newly married couple.

Convinced that she’s been raped, Tsang proceeds to marry Lee, only to reveal her trauma afterwards. When her sleazy new husband – the film makes sure we see his many assignations – feels insulted and promises to make her life hell, Tsang is contacted by her mystery captor with a plan to punish Lee.

So what’s Fong, the story’s voice-over narrator, doing in all this? And did I mention Lee’s driver and Tsang’s building security guard, who both behave too creepily to even qualify as red herrings?

Ultimately, viewers of this convoluted attempt at a psychological thriller are bound to find its revelations banal and irrelevant. Named after the aria from Puccini’s Turandot, and even incorporating some of its dramatic ideas into the flashback-heavy proceedings, Nessun Dorma is just not as clever as it thinks.

This pedestrian piece of pulp entertainment only makes All of a Sudden – Yau’s dark, exploitative and entertaining thriller from 1996 – look like a genuine classic.

Nessun Dorma opens on October 27

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