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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
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ReviewUnidentified Murder movie review: twisty Hong Kong comedy is admirable for its ambition

This award-winning comedy about an online prank that ends in a murder is a quirky story underpinned by the performances of its lead actors

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Ling Man-lung as Mark (left) and Renci Yeung as his girlfriend Man in a still from Unidentified Murder (category IIB, Cantonese), directed by Kwok Ka-hei and Jack Lee.
Edmund Lee

3/5 stars

To understand how a modestly staged feature like Unidentified Murder manages to charm the socks off so many Hong Kong critics – despite doing only a passable job of tackling its subjects of male friendship, shoddy scams and grass-roots filmmaking – one must first acknowledge the depressing state of local comedy.

When the Hong Kong Film Critics Society gave the best screenplay honour to this quirky effort in January 2026, it had been years since Stephen Chow Sing-chi and Pang Ho-cheung vacated the scene, leaving behind a dearth of comedy talents – and investors – daring enough to experiment with either content or form.
Enter writer-director duo Kwok Ka-hei and Jack Lee Chun-kit’s feature debut, which unapologetically plays like a spiritual cousin to One Cut of the Dead (2017), the inventive Japanese zombie movie that makes use of its nesting-doll narrative to explore the insane possibilities of comedy writing. It is, in other words, at least trying.
【正式預告】凌文龍 ✕ 楊偲泳 ✕ 陳湛文 ✕ 林子傑 ✕ 黃德斌 爆笑力作《UFO離奇命案》Unidentified Murder 7月4日 開心Share

Riffing on the desperate tactics of YouTube content creation – much like the way the cult hit satirised ultra-low-budget filmmaking – Unidentified Murder adopts a three-act structure that starts out unconvincingly, only to revisit the premise from a different perspective in each subsequent part to playfully pile on the absurdity of the situation.

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