A guide to Soi Cheang, enfant terrible of Hong Kong cinema (2024)

24May 2024

In the late 20th century, Hong Kong was a filmmaking powerhouse. Known for martial fighting spectacles starring Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh; guns-blazing action epics like City on Fire and Hard Boiled; and the decadent arthouse cinema of Wong Kar-wai, the region’s cinema was so highly regarded that it was referred to as the ‘Hollywood of the East’. But since the Handover of 1997 and the subsequent Asian financial crisis, the industry has slid into a slow and steady decline, with only a few figures consistently delivering work of a quality that pushes against this gloomy rhetoric. One of them is Soi Cheang.

Raised through the ranks when the industry was at its lowest point – as an assistant to filmmakers like Ringo Lam (City on Fire), Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs), Wilson Yip (Ip Man) and Johnnie To (Election) – the Macau-born director-producer is one of the most likely proponents for its revival today. His violent, glossy, and richly atmospheric thrillers are delivered with such energy and creative verve that they have ignited both the local box office and Europe’s top film festivals in recent years. In 2023, Variety dubbed Cheang “Hong Kong’s most commercially successful enfant terrible” – a statement fitting for his intense but exciting filmmaking style.

With his latest gripping production, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, shaking up Cannes Film Festival last week ahead of its UK and Ireland cinema release today, Dazed recaps the taut crime dramas, brooding noirs, and slick action flicks that have made Cheang a standout in commercial Hong Kong filmmaking. Recap on five highlights of his career below for a taste of bone-crushing cinema that harks back to the industry’s golden age to make a defiant statement for the future.

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In bustling inner-city Hong Kong, an automobile driver is shockingly killed after his attempts to avoid a traffic jam spark a chain of reactive events. His demise appears an unfortunate tragedy – but this is, in fact, the work of expert “accident choreographers” who utilise elaborate public set-ups to discreetly fulfil their goals. The contract killers continue to operate undetected until another spectacle goes terribly wrong – forcing the leader of the pack to question whether he himself has become the target of brutal sabotage and conspiracy.

Soi Cheang’s first collaboration with Milkyway Image – the production company helmed by Johnnie To – shares a close kinship with the work of the Y2K crime cinema heavyweight, thanks in part to the presence of recognisable actors like Louis Koo (Election), Lam Suet (The Mission) and Richie Jen (Exiled), and key To crew members in various creative departments. It’s the perfect foundation for the kind of slick, stylish thriller that Cheang will later become recognised for – with evocative lighting, torrential weather, minimal dialogue, and Xavier Jamaux’s melancholy piano score elevating its brilliantly staged set pieces.

Flecks of Brian de Palma can be found elsewhere in this brooding and paranoia-laced neo-noir, with Accident ultimately feeling like the missing link between The Conversation and Final Destination. It competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 – becoming the first of many Cheang thrillers to court both mainstream enthusiasm in Hong Kong and critical prestige in Europe.

Accident’s dream team hit new heights in 2012 as Cheang directed the second unit on To’s gripping crime epic Drug War, and To and Milkyway Image produced Cheang’s tire-scorching thriller Motorway. The latter spectacle would receive six nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards off the back of a sizeable box office return – as Cheang’s profile grew ever-larger.

The film in question is your classic gear-shifting cop caper. Shawn Yue (Infernal Affairs II) plays a nifty traffic cop in a nocturnal, labyrinthine Hong Kong framed by snaking highways and overpasses; his adversaries are diamond-thieving crooks with a knack for unlikely getaways. Veteran actors Anthony Wong (Hard Boiled) and Gordon Lam (Limbo) play pivotal supporting roles in a police department destined for vehicular action – as a cat-and-mouse chase leads to a tense port-side showdown.

It might sound like The Fast and the Furious but Motorway is more serious and menacing in tone, despite occasional implausibility and melodrama. Nothing can be taken away from the technical prowess on show – with car-mounted camerawork and whiplash shakycam injecting dynamism into every glinting chassis and crushed roadside wreckage. And the cold, blue-hued cinematography perfectly underpins the film’s icy tone.

After manning a string of megabucks, SFX-laden fantasy films on the mainland, Cheang returned to his natural oeuvre in Hong Kong with a Berlin Film Festival-approved thriller that remains his bleakest and best. Released just as tough new censorship laws were being enforced in the region, Limbo is a grim and dystopian noir that offers a pessimistic allegory for the changing times – as glistening monochrome cinematography captures a festering, garbage-ridden metropolis in the grips of a depraved serial killer.

Gordon Lam is compelling as the grizzled Cham Lau, a scrawny, goatee-wearing veteran detective following a trail of severed hands; he’s partnered by Will Yam (Mason Lee), a smart rookie cop who suffers from perpetual toothache. Lau begins to follow a twisted path when he forces a drug-addicted petty criminal from his past (Cya Lui – who won a string of major awards for her performance) into becoming their informant – and as he uses her to bait the city’s underworld, he soon realises his actions have gone too far.

Deliberately paced and punctuated by grisly violence – with hard-hitting sound design a standout in the film’s gruelling climax – Limbo is quite simply one of the most atmospheric thrillers to come out of Hong Kong in recent years. Boasting a dark edge akin to classic Hollywood neo-noir Se7en, and a visual signature that points to the oppressive backdrop of Sin City, the film would end up being nominated for pretty much everything at the Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong Film Awards upon release – with both ceremonies granting Limbo prizes for cinematography, art direction and writing.

Cheang’s next Berlin-championed feature reunited the director with Limbo’s leading man Gordon Lam – this time casting him as an eccentric urban fortune teller who attempts to divert a troubled man from his destiny to commit murder. All the while, Hong Kong is in the midst of a series of nasty killings elsewhere – but this incarnation of the city has a decidedly different feel to that of Limbo, eschewing bleak monochrome for kaleidoscopic neon colours that light up the metropolis like a Christmas tree.

Gritty, wacky, and leaning heavily into the Chinese spiritualist bent, Mad Fate likewise draws from the director’s early experiences in horror cinema to deliver a unique genre hybrid –which led to strong box office success in the native market. More significantly, this was the film that won Cheang the Best Director gong at the Hong Kong Film Awards at the third time of asking (he was previously nominated for Motorway and Limbo) – as well as earning him a spot on Dazed’s coveted ‘Best East Asian films of 2023’ list.

The real Kowloon Walled City was a 2.6-hectare Hong Kong slum notorious for its poor living conditions, rampant gang activity, and opium parlours, brothels and gambling dens. With 40,000 residents living on top of one another in dilapidated spaces largely ungoverned by police, it would become a hotbed for violence – and was referred to as the ‘City of Darkness’ in Cantonese prior to its demolition between 1993 and 1994.

In Cheang’s ‘80s-set Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, this infamous enclave serves as a theatre for non-stop fist-pummelling action – as illegal immigrant Lok (Raymond Lam) gets caught up in a fierce conflict between warring triad factions. The combatants are led by cigar-chomping crime lord Mr. Big (Hong Kong action cinema legend Sammo Hung) and the Walled City’s de facto ruler, Cyclone (Louis Koo). And with all manner of masked thugs and scythe-wielding maniacs at their disposal, this two-hour maelstrom of wall-crumbling chaos leaves no face unbruised.

Hot off the press from a rousing Cannes premiere last week, Twilight of the Warriors delivers on its rowdy promise by channelling contemporary, close-quarters action classics like The Raid and Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. It’s also one of the most expensive Hong Kong movies of all time – sparing no expense when it comes to dynamic set-pieces atop double-decker buses, and in tight alleyways flanked with wire fencing, rusting sheet metal and electricity cables. The plot is an afterthought, but the claustrophobic cinematography and production design is emphatic. And having topped the box office in Hong Kong, a sequel and a prequel have already been green-lit.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is out now in UK and Irish cinemas.