A clinical psychiatrist gets a taste of his own medicine when his treatment of a semi-schizophrenic patient backfires, so that his own grasp on reality grows ever more tenuous, taking us on an arresting, genre-splicing adventure through a version of Hong Kong choking on the fallout of the 2008 financial crash.
Dream sequences use every trick in the early-2000s horror-movie book – double exposures, fast and slow motion, cutting between different film stocks, stretching the image this way and that like it’s being projected on to a sheet of rubber – until its pages are scraped clean.
But surgical opening titles slice into these once-fashionable techniques, as if adding a layer of chin-stroking contemplation about how these kinds of films used to be made, and after a while these oneiric excursions evolve into much more original and striking, sometimes downright bizarre, imagery which has to be seen to be believed.
The film’s daytime ‘real’ world is shot in a bleaker and less colourful tone, where light pours in from the side to illuminate only half of the characters’ faces, their shadow aspects staying leeward from our curious gaze. The action there seems more realistic; but even that retains a restless energy, the editor unable to choose between angles and therefore jumping from one to the other in a game of visual hopscotch. Even the dialogue adopts this protean attitude, switching from Cantonese to English in moments of stress.
The focus puller gets in on the game too, with transitions that blur light sources into a blinding miasma, or in post-production a freeze-frame is flooded with garish artistic effects until they bleed. Sound design encrusts in our ears into a waxy sludge of barely consonant over-extended super-chords. The cumulative effect of all this self-conscious but engrossing trickery is to take full, often spectacular, advantage of cinema’s reputation as the most dreamlike of all art forms.Takashi Miike, Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch all stroll the perimeter of director Nick Cheung’s subconscious, but he doesn’t simply spoof or regurgitate his influences. Instead he prefers to lean into the weird ideas that coalesced into his own story, granting an odd sincerity to its peculiar brand of psycho-cinematic mayhem.
Part fantasy-horror, part social-conscience drama, part detective noir, Peg O’ My Heart makes a determined mockery of conscious science attempting to enforce logic and reason upon the wild and unmapped realms of the unconscious mind. But it does so with an enthralling combination of rigorous self-awareness, sly humour and a dynamic and genuinely unsettling exploration of its themes.-Stew Mott-
