Victim (1999)

Original title: 目露凶光

Warning: you can’t talk about this one without spoiling large parts of the plot!

Manson Man (Lau Ching-Wan), a businessman fallen on hard times thanks to the financial crisis is suddenly kidnapped by gangsters. It’s a bit of strange case – Man’s girlfriend Amy (Amy Kwok Oi-Ming) clearly doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. There’s after all no money at all to be had from them. The police, particularly Detective Pit Kwan (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), are rather sceptical about the whole affair, even more so when they discover that Man had gotten heavily in debt with some gangsters. Though, as Amy tells it, they managed to pay it all off, so there shouldn’t be any reason coming from that side either.

Man is set free after a while, without any money having flown, but there’s something really strange about the situation: he’s left for the pick-up in a house supposedly haunted. During the police rescue, enough very peculiar things happen to suggest to Detective Kwan as well as to Amy that there may be something supernatural going on.

Particularly since Man acts very strangely after his release, in ways not terribly typical of someone who has gone through a traumatic event. It is more as if he were another person completely. Why, one might think he’s possessed by a spirit.

Though, and here come the spoilers, if the central character of Ringo Lam’s Victim is possessed by a malevolent force, it’s the spirit of capitalism rather than anything supernatural. As it will eventually turn out, Man’s not possessed, he has just turned into a very human monster. As portrayed with expected and perfectly appropriate intensity by the great Lau Ching-Wan, Man was clearly a true believer in the promises of a highly capitalist society, and suddenly had to learn that you can play by the rules you’ve been taught are the right ones all of your life, and still lose everything for no fault of your own. Which simply breaks him, and makes him willing to do absolutely anything to become rich again, leaving scruples, Amy’s love for him and basically everything that makes him human behind to plan a rather impressive crime and double-cross that needs to involve quite the bloodbath. Even before bad luck and bad partners turn parts of the plan even more bloody than Man must have thought they needed to be.

There’s really no other reading for the film than this strong and angry kind of capitalism criticism as delivered through a pretty singular mixture of horror and crime movie. This desperate scrabbling for loot of course is a thematic angle than ran through many a crime movie from Hongkong during the 80s and the 90s, when making lots of money to escape the City as long as it was still British seems to have been a central goal in the place’s culture at large. Only the body count by gun shot wounds is dramatized.

Lam in his mode of brutal realism – he can do operatic as well, but often chooses not to – is the perfect filmmaker to tackle this kind of material. He provides the film with an angry energy that from time to time explodes outwards in short and brutal shoot-outs and beatings. In these moments, the film is as kinetic as Lam’s older, classic movies in the genre, but there’s a desperate quality here the film shares with Man.

Victim’s realist approach also works well when it pretends to be a supernatural horror movie instead of a moral one. At that point in the movie Manson’s seeming possession and irrational behaviour are provided with extra heft by how grounded his surroundings feel, as well as by how much stock the clearly reasonable Kwan as well as Amy, who believes she knows Man much better than she actually does, put in it as an explanation. In the end, and rather ironically, a supernatural force driving Man to his deeds would have been the friendlier and less desperate explanation. In the Hongkong of Victim, evil ghosts are just too friendly an explanation to be real.