The stench of injustice has often been a concern of Hong Kong filmmaking legend Herman Yau.
In his early work in the notorious Category III canon of exploitation films, he dabbled in horrific scenarios filled with every sensory assault you can think of; Anthony Wong's exactor of malice and evil at the centre of Ebola Syndrome spreads his infection through all manner of fluids, assaults and violations without rhyme or reason. In The Untold Story, the whiff of human remains folded into pork buns envelop the drama, sickening you to the pit of your stomach in a truly sensational way.
His career has become somewhat more respectable over time, yet this motif has remained, all the way up to his new hard-hitting drama, We're Nothing At All. The overwhelming smell of garlic hangs over a horrible Valentine's Day scene in a Hong Kong street, suggestive of a specific kind of highly-flammable gas that has ignited and engulfed dozens of unsuspecting bus passengers.
The charred body parts have rendered identification extremely difficult, and the fragments of personalities annihilated by the blast are all that is left to investigate. Enter retired police detective Leung (Patrick Tam), whose forensic expertise leads him into a dark web of bad feeling centred around two potential perpetrators (Anson Kong and Anson Chan, credited as Ansonbean), whose story Yau tenderly (and then brutally) illustrates through heartbreaking flashbacks.
An LGBT tale that deepens and darkens with every narrative shift, Yau deserves credit for pulling no punches in his depiction of those at life's margins, sent to the brink for their sexuality and given little opportunity to come back. The procedural elements led by Tam are aligned delicately with the hard lives of Anson Kong's Fai and Ansonbean's Ike, whose disparate lonely lives come into one another's orbit, at first platonically, then romantically, and finally violently. The dual-narrative structure doesn't do much in the way of twisting the mystery into new shapes; instead, Yau trusts his audience well enough to make their own moral judgments on the awful situation, casting away surprise in favour of wrenching your guts in a different way.
The intimate moments between Fai and Ike have a fearless physicality and charged danger that play out like Happy Together with a hopelessly angry edge, extrapolating another of Hong Kong's finest LGBT stories and slamming its hot-and-cold relationship against a wall until it's battered and bruised. One bedroom monologue compares the act of living in the closet as an unspeakable torture method levelled at found-out spies; the victim is disembowelled, while having their guts thrown into a fire while they're still alive...heady, heavy stuff! There's no denying the vulnerability that the two stars bring to the drama, and their convincing opposites-attract chemistry and combative tough love anchors the film when its other elements threaten to shake it.
Theirs is the heart of the story, while the forensic drama is its spine...and it's ultimately a very long spine. While the initial examination of the mass killing is as stomach-churning as it is intriguing, adding layers to Detective Leung and eventually limiting his degrees of separation from the incident is a misstep.
The film's dabbling in hokey hysteria comes in the form of a third act twist that overeggs the pathos of the drama, leaving behind what was a melancholy dissection of lives annihilated by the impossibility of acceptance and leaping into a contrived epic that dots every I and crosses every T. The main flashback plot does the same, losing its tender side and becoming increasingly determined to shock, unfortunately to numbing ends.
Yau almost has a Get Out of Jail free card in a meta moment where the two lovers talk about old romance movies: "In old movies, when the characters sacrificed everything for love, people called it touching. Now, audiences will either say it makes no sense or call the characters lovesick and foolish." And while it's unfair to say We're Nothing At All makes no sense, it certainly loses its grip, coming full circle to a moment of horror that plays extremely cheaply and tactlessly after two hours of quietly chipping away at your tear ducts.
An earnest if ungraceful addition to Yau's uncompromising canon, We're Nothing At All deserves recognition for its director's characteristic controversy wrapped up in a surprising new form. The malodorous smell of life's unpleasant back alleys is often impressively conveyed, but leading you further and further into them for such a wet final note washes the eye-watering effect away very quickly.
The film opens Friday, 29 May, throughout the UK, only in cinemas, via Trinity CineAsia. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.