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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
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Review | Love Lies movie review: Sandra Ng, Michael Cheung in online dating scam comedy drama

Ng plays an emotionally stunted doctor who falls prey to an online dating scam in a film with a profound message hidden beneath its comedy

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Sandra Ng as doctor Veronica Yu and Michael Cheung as scam artist Joe Lee in a still from Love Lies (category I; Cantonese), directed by Ho Miu-ki.
Edmund Lee

3/5 stars

An online dating scam takes on a life of its own in Love Lies, a fitfully melancholy, often amusing look at romance, deception and human nature that draws us in with its thought-provoking premise but struggles to realise the full potential of its ingenious set-up.

Sandra Ng Kwan-yue gives her most nuanced performance in years – certainly more so than her celebrated turn in Zero to Hero – as Veronica Yu, a successful gynaecologist whose private life has been a mess; she was in an emotionally stunted state even before her husband (Emotion Cheung Kam-ching) died suddenly years earlier.
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When we first meet her, Yu is being questioned by police as a fraud victim. Curiously, she refuses to press charges despite having lost a huge sum of money, instead insisting that she has fully enjoyed her virtual romance with a middle-aged French engineer and widower she met on a dating app.

On the flip side of the con, and being questioned in the next room, is Joe Lee (singer “MC” Michael Cheung Tin-fu, One Night at School), newly recruited by a dating scam syndicate led by Chan Fai-hung’s mastermind and Stephy Tang Lai-yan’s flirty strategist. Lee may be the one who has called the police on them.
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Love Lies poses two fascinating questions: why would an intelligent woman like Yu fall prey to the obvious traps set by Lee and his peers – and still come out to defend the perpetrators? And what happens if the swindler begins to empathise with, and perhaps fall for, his target against all reason?

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