Review | Deliverance movie review: Hong Kong psychological mystery is visually striking but ill-conceived – and too easy for the viewer to solve
- Director Kelvin Shum’s feature film debut is atmospheric and visually striking, but undone by its highly unrealistic screenplay and an easy-to-guess plot twist
- A trio of brothers attempt to hide the truth of their mother’s death from their sister, who is determined to mine her faulty memories of the traumatic event
2/5 stars
Deliverance is a stylised blend of psychological mystery and crime thriller, in which almost every scene and character are written to accommodate the supposedly shocking plot twist near the end. Unfortunately, the said big reveal turns out to be a dud.
After an ominous opening in which Simon Yam Tat-wah’s psychology professor cryptically declares at a lecture that the truth people crave from their own memories can be brutal, we are introduced to the protagonists at a dinner for Nicole (Summer Chan Tsz-huen), the youngest of his family and a returnee to Hong Kong.
Nicole’s siblings include the aforementioned Joseph (Yam, way too old for the part), who is the eldest brother and de facto head of the family; second brother Will (Justin Cheung Kin-sing), a wealthy businessman with triad connections and a thinly veiled dark side; and Aaron (Ron Ng Cheuk-hei), the adopted third brother who works as a police inspector.
It is made clear that they are all hiding something from Nicole, and perceptive viewers will also become aware that these characters exist solely to drip-feed details about the heroine’s quest: to find out how their gravely ill mother (Carrie Ng Ka-lai) really died 15 years ago.
While her brothers insist the death was from natural causes, Nicole, who was 12 at the time and is now a trainee medical doctor, somehow believes that her mother was murdered – despite having lost consciousness during the traumatic episode.
Nicole, who has been going to hypnosis sessions to piece together her fragmented memories with Joseph, is growing suspicious of Will, who she remembers as a debt-ridden gambler. Meanwhile, Aaron is on the hunt for a serial killer of women who happens to have much fewer than six degrees of separation from Nicole.
The fatal flaw of their film is that its one major revelation also happens to be the only logical one that you suspect from the beginning, as ludicrous as it might seem at first and as unconvincing as it remains in the end.
The Shum brothers told the audience at the preview screening this writer attended that the main theme of Deliverance is love. Unfortunately, their high-concept effort is but a facile attempt to package that idea inside a painfully contrived genre exercise. It is all a bit daft in hindsight.
