Love Massacre (1981)

Original title: 愛殺

The film takes place among a group of Hong Kong expat students living in the United States. Joy (Tina Lau Tin-Lan), who appears to suffer from a psychosis, attempts suicide when her boyfriend Louie (Charlie Chin Chiang-Lin) decides to move to New York without her.

Louie – who isn’t a complete tool - and their friend Ivy (Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia) really don’t know how to help Joy anymore, so they ask Joy’s brother Chiu Chung (Chang Kuo-Chu) to fly in from Hong Kong to help hi sister somehow. At first, the plan seems to work out well enough, but once the married Chiu Chung and Ivy start an affair, Joy’s getting even worse than before, and finally goes through with killing herself.

Chiu Chung is understandably hit hard by this and deteriorates much further than anyone could have expected, for he really is mentally just as unwell as his sister was, he’s just better at hiding this in front of strangers. He returns to Hong Kong, but does not become more stable there. In fact, he murders his wife (his former psychiatrist no less!) to then return to the USA and start stalking Ivy and murdering every woman in her closer surroundings he deems “uncooperative”.

Patrick Tam Kar-Ming is one of the less sung heroes of Hong Kong’s New Wave cinema. Given the quality of those of his movies I’ve managed to see (I don’t trust my old, negative, review of his The Sword anymore in this context), I suspect this has rather more to do with their bad availability than their quality.

Love Massacre is a case in point. At once a cool, serious but not compassionless, exploration of an extreme of mental illness and eventually a pretty brutal thriller of great formal strength and cold beauty, this is the kind of film that would normally put a filmmaker on the map of the greats. However, the best way to see Love Massacre at the moment is a Laser Disc rip with decidedly not great subtitles (though not as bad as some for Hong Kong films), so there’s only talk about it at all among those movie fans actually looking for this sort of thing and knowing where to find it, instead of the somewhat larger audience of more strictly law-abiding connoisseurs it deserves.

The washed out colours of a Laser Disc aren’t particularly wonderful in a film as strictly and meaningfully colour composed as this one either, but even so, there’s an intense cold power to Tam’s strict use of clearly separated colours, as is to his just as strictly composed use of the frame. In the latter, Love Massacre shows some visual kinship to the best works of Dario Argento, yet where Argento does tend to get emotionally involved in the acts of violence and the more grotesque elements of his films, Tam watches them with a cooler and more distanced eye that does get increasingly disquieting the longer the film goes on, and the more unpleasant the violence gets exactly because it seems so dispassionate.

Still, despite the cold eye, when there isn’t violence on screen, there is also a feeling of thoughtful compassion running through it, or at least a genuine human interest in its characters. Tam does show this for killer and victims and those in-between alike, which makes the whole affair’s distanced visual beauty a particularly interesting and individual decision. An artistically risky one, as well, but one that makes Love Massacre particularly worth watching.