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Paul Che in a scene from Coffin Homes (category: III, Cantonese), directed by Fruit Chan. Wong You-nam and Tai Bo co-star.

Review | Coffin Homes movie review: Fruit Chan horror comedy takes aim at Hong Kong’s property speculation frenzy

  • This satire on Hongkongers’ irrational behaviour in the face of soaring real estate market prices has a wild and surreal tone throughout
  • Although lacking genuine scares, its plentiful digs at the city’s political and economic realities will keep fans of Chan’s socially conscious movies happy

3/5 stars

The poor exploit the poor to survive while the rich kill each other to get even richer in Coffin Homes, Fruit Chan Gor’s satire on Hongkongers’ irrational response to endlessly soaring real estate market prices.

Both funny and sad, it offers the bitterest indictment of the city’s widening class divide. Bizarrely, Chan delivers this social criticism within the framework of a “splatstick” horror comedy.

The movie’s wild and sometimes surreal tone is set in the opening scene, when the dying matriarch of a wealthy family (Susan Siu Yam-yam) literally turns into a monster and kills four of her five adult children in grotesque fashion – after the quartet try to sell her villa.

The efforts of the surviving daughter (Loletta Lee Lai-chun) to bury the bodies and evaluate the property make up one of the film’s three plot strands.

In the main storyline, Chan regular Wong You-nam plays Jimmy, a struggling property agent who spends his nights squatting in an empty Mid-Levels flat he’s supposed to help sell – never mind that the ghost of its owner (Paul Che Bo-law), a butcher who murdered and dismembered his wife there, opposes its sale.

How Fruit Chan turned Hong Kong’s housing issue into a horror comedy

Then Jimmy’s girlfriend (Chelffy Yau Tsz-mei), a fellow agent, goes missing and leaves him with all her debts (and debt collectors).

Meanwhile, selfish landlord Mr Lam (Tai Bo) tries to squeeze as many tenants as possible into his crummy subdivided flat in a tenement building – casually ignoring the fact that it is haunted by the mischievous ghost of Lil Keung (Marek Li Hoi-lam, a real find), an abandoned kid who died years ago.

The ghostly sightings at this location – apart from one nightmare scene involving stomach cutting – are more heart-warming than scary.

Tai Bo in a scene from Coffin Homes.

Chan has directed both horror movies (Dumplings) and social allegories (Three Husbands), and occasionally both at the same time (The Midnight After), and Coffin Homes may be his most unhinged attempt yet to merge the two genres.

Although it lacks genuine scares, the screenplay, co-written by Chan and Jason Lam Kee-to, takes plenty of digs at the city’s political and economic realities to keep fans of the director’s socially conscious movies happy.

While its three storylines do converge, audiences expecting a conventional narrative from this very quotable film should instead brace for its barrage of genre excesses.

Marek Li (left) and Wong in a still from Coffin Homes.

The cartoonish violence culminates in a farcical climax which, at one point, sees headless ghouls dance around with blood of different colours – another political metaphor? – spurting vigorously from their neck wounds. Coffin Homes is not for the narrow-minded.

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