ReviewLove Is Blind, Hate Too movie review: Kathy Yuen plays victim to Patrick Kong’s misogyny in dreadful attempt at psychological thriller

Director Patrick Kong’s homage to early 1990s Hong Kong soft-core porn films is a misogynistic mess

Kong’s first attempt at a thriller lacks any suspense or terror, and feels like a vehicle for the exploitation of Kathy Yuen

2-MIN READ2-MIN

Kathy Yuen in a still from Love Is Blind, Hate Too (category IIB, Cantonese), directed by Patrick Kong. Poon Chan-leung and Ron Ng co-star.

Published: 12:45pm, 5 Jan 2022

1.5/5 stars

For nearly two decades writer-director-producer Patrick Kong Pak-leung kept returning to his signature brand of cynical yet frequently awful romantic comedies. For much of that time, it was one of this writer’s secret wishes that he would stop flogging a dead horse and try making something different.

After watching his latest film, Love Is Blind, Hate Too, which one might generously describe as a psychological thriller, I’m not so sure any more.

Ostensibly a homage to those early 1990s Hong Kong Category III movies which juxtaposed soft-core porn with sordid portrayals of criminal acts, Kong’s film is especially beholden to 1993’s 3 Days of a Blind Girl, which starred adult-film icon Veronica Yip Yuk-hing as a blind woman terrorised at home by an intruder.

Kong’s take on the exploitation film casts the pristine starlet Kathy Yuen Ka-yee (When Sun Meets Moon) as Bo, a fiction writer who lost her vision in a late-night car accident a year ago when she was on her way to retrieve some documents for her doctor husband Wah (Ron Ng Cheuk-hei, Ladies Market).

In the present day, after Wah goes on an overnight business trip and leaves her all alone in their quiet country mansion, Bo is, to her shock, saved from drowning in her own swimming pool by a total stranger, Mandel (Poon Chan-leung, Men on the Dragon), who claims that her front gate is unlocked.