Mrs K (2017)

Mrs K (Kara Hui) lives what looks like a peaceful life with her gynaecologist husband (Wu Bai) and her daughter (Li Xuan Siow). Though, as a couple of very unlucky would-be robbers learn early in the film, Mrs K clearly has some experience with the gangster life and is a bit of a badass, when she needs to.

However, the good old shadows of the past come knocking, killing some of Mrs K former associates in violent and effective ways. As it turns out, a man (Simon Yam) our protagonist left for dead when she left the life (naturally with a whole lot of stolen money) wants his revenge, and he’s nearly crazy and broken enough for a Batman villain.

Evidently, Mrs K’s director Ho Yu-Hang looks back fondly at Hong Kong genre cinema of decades past. Since quite a few actresses and actors who had their heyday in the 70s to 90s are still working away admirably, it’s a pretty obvious thing to make a movie with them. Ho certainly isn’t the first director who went back to this particular well of talent – and who would blame him? – but he’s just as obviously not aiming at making a normal nostalgia throwback kind of movie. This is rather a more idiosyncratic film that shifts shape and form despite always just keeping inside of the borders of genre tradition.

So there are only a couple of action scenes in what one would on first encounter expect to be either a martial arts version of Taken or a traditional if belated heroic bloodshed film. Instead, the film shifts from a slasher-like beginning that shows Yam’s character killing Mrs K’s old associates to moments of sometimes calm, sometimes playful domestic content, goes to psychological tension, a bit of torture, some comedy, keeping what sounds like disparate elements as parts of a whole, while also demonstrating an air of playfulness. There’s even a scene where the ghosts of her old companions appear to Mrs K to the sound of a rousing Spaghetti Western trumpet to get her back into the fight.

In part, the film’s success as a whole instead as a series of disjointed scenes has a lot to do with an acting ensemble that portrays the different tone of any given scene as aspects of one story and one group of characters, understanding the way human identity shifts depending on the company we are in, and even more so how Mrs K’s identity must shift even more to be who she was and who she has become. The film as a whole seems very concerned with the concept of identity, particularly the shifts in identity brought by violence and trauma. Simon Yam’s villain was once a cop who ran with robbers to betray them to the cops but also betrayed the cops for money, has lost his identity and his memory once shot by Mrs, starts to live a new life as the member of a ship crew that becomes his family, only to lose this new family to violence that gives him back his memory as well as a lust for vengeance and that great changer of identity, insomnia. As with Mrs K, he might have built a new identity, but the old one, or really, old ones, are always just below the surface waiting for a reason to return. That Yam’s fantastic as this sort of thing should be a given.

It is an absolute joy to watch Kara Hui as the main character of a movie again, and her ability to project warmth, good humour, competence and a steely determination in desperate moments alone would be reason enough for that; she also seems to present a healthier alternative of learning to live with one’s past self than Yam does. Or perhaps, when you look at it from his perspective, she’s just been too lucky before he came back.


So, even though, or really rather because, Mrs K is not a nostalgia fest as much as a film that appreciates the very real talents of the people working in front of its camera and trusts them to not just repeat the things they always did (unlike the characters they play, perhaps), it should be of highest interest for anyone interested in Hong Kong's cinema past, present and future (even though this is – depending on the source – a Malaysian film or a Malaysian/Hong Kong/Russian co-production).