3.5/5 stars

The plight of Hong Kong’s working class during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic is poignantly dramatised in The Narrow Road, which sees a man and a woman, both financially stricken, form a bond that offers solace from their personal struggles – before threatening to tear them apart again.

Louis Cheung Kai-chung plays Chak, the honest operator of a one-man cleaning business that is going south amid the stalling economy and dwindling supply of detergent. Though he barely has time to care for his ailing mother (Patra Au Ga-man), all the hard work he has put in makes little difference.

Chak’s lonely life is interrupted when Candy (Angela Yuen Lai-lam), a colourfully dressed young single mother who lives with her daughter (Tung On-na) in a windowless subdivided flat in the industrial building where he has his office, answers his job ad for a cleaning assistant.

He is soon made aware of Candy’s survival tactics as an outcast without either family or friends: resourceful in often unethical ways, she would steal or scam for a living without a hint of remorse. She is eventually persuaded to change her ways, but circumstances – and old habits – conspire to destroy the pair.

Yet apart from the “Stay healthy, God bless Hong Kong” Post-it note that greets the audience at the film’s start, as well as repeated talk about emigration being a privilege for the rich, Lam’s new film is less a social critique than it is a character drama with a humanistic overtone.