Film review: Partners in Crime - murder mystery full of teenage angst
The mysterious death of a teenage girl in Partners in Crime becomes the catalyst that pulls three lonely boys together — before tearing them apart again.
Starring: Wu Chien-ho, Deng Yu-kai, Cheng Kai-yuan
Director: Chang Jung-chi
Category: IIA (Mandarin)
The mysterious death of a teenage girl in Partners in Crime becomes the catalyst that pulls three lonely boys together — before tearing them apart again. The second directorial effort of Chang Jung-chi (whose debut Touch of the Light was Taiwan's submission for the Oscars in 2012), this suspense thriller offers a darkly atmospheric twist to the island's tradition of innocuous high school dramas.
Huang (Wu Chien-ho) is a loner in school and a target of bullying outside class. When he comes across the body of Hsia Wei-chiao (Yao Ai-ning), a rich, young girl who has just fallen to her death from a building, the boy finds a fresh sense of purpose as he investigates the apparent suicide with two male schoolmates who happen to walk past the scene at the same time.
As the new buddies — including tough jock Yeh (Cheng Kai-yuan) and straight-A student Lin (Deng Yu-kai) — dig into Hsia's past, going so far as to pretend to be her friends at her funeral and break into her home, the film takes a turn for the malicious. Nominally a tactic to avenge the deceased, the trio's plan to prank a presumed culpable party in the woods incurs tragic consequences.
Although he evokes the debate on guilt in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger, a recurrent prop in the film, Chang is ultimately more preoccupied with the theme of loneliness as he flirts with the detective routine. Uniformly struggling to survive in a world of apathetic adults, it soon transpires that the alienated teens in this disquieting drama are just fending for themselves in any way they know how.