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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
LifestyleEntertainment

ReviewThe Last Dance movie review: Dayo Wong, Michael Hui impress in exquisite funeral drama

Comic actors excel in purely dramatic roles, but Michelle Wai steals the show in an engrossing film that champions female empowerment

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Dayo Wong (left) and Michael Hui in a still from The Last Dance (category IIB; Cantonese), directed by Anselm Chan. Michelle Wai co-stars. Photo: Emperor Motion Pictures
Edmund Lee

4/5 stars

The intricacies of family ties and the burden of traditional customs weigh heavily on the protagonists of The Last Dance, a life-affirming gem of a film that is set around Hong Kong’s funeral trade and features two comedy icons, Dayo Wong Tze-wah and Michael Hui Koon-man, in purely dramatic roles.
Coming off starring roles in two of the highest-grossing Hong Kong films of all time, in Table for Six (2022) and A Guilty Conscience (2023), Wong may well pull off a box-office hat trick with his understated part as Dominic, an out-of-work wedding planner who has been in serious debt after his company was sunk by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Upon taking over the Hung Hom shop of a retiring funeral agent as a last resort to stay afloat, Dominic is not just unnerved by the morbid enterprise – which often involves handling the departed’s remains – but also struggles to win over his new business partner Master Man (Hui in great form), a stern Taoist priest in his eighties.

Dominic’s eagerness to meet all his clients’ wishes is initially greeted with contempt by Man – although the former’s resolve to satisfy a most unconventional request from a grieving mother (Rosa Maria Velasco) appears to have opened the old man’s eyes to the true value of their work: to comfort the living.

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