‘Mad Fate’: Berlin Review

Dir: Soi Cheang. 2023. Hong Kong. 108mins

There are only intermittent flashes of old-school Hong Kong genre brilliance in Soi Cheang’s follow-up to the hit crime drama Limbo, which premiered in the same Berlinale Special slot in 2021. The story of a fortune teller who believes he can cheat fate, it will excite fans of Cantonese noir as the first serious writing gig for veteran Johnnie To collaborator Yau Na-hoi since his script for Three in 2016. Alas, the chaotic plot and flabby structure of the screenplay, which Yau co-wrote with Melvin Li, places Mad Fate light years from Yau’s best work for To, or Soi’s own career peaks so far in atmospheric actioners like Accident or Motorway.

This convoluted yarn can be read as a metaphor for a city adrift

Soi is one of the few directors left to carry the torch for classic Hong Kong mean-streets drama, one of the few things that gives this messy film a frisson of interest for followers of Far Eastern cinema: the fact that, consciously or not, this convoluted yarn about a derelict city of hookers, clairvoyants and psychos, its dark palette darkened further by bruised and menacing storm clouds, can be read as a metaphor for a city adrift. Or a reaction to years of political turmoil and empty streets as the city tied its locked-door Covid-19 policies to that of China.

Mad Fate begins engagingly enough with a graveyard scene that is played partly for laughs, as a character credited only as the ‘Fortune Telling Master’ performs a fake burial ceremony designed to avert the grisly end he has foreseen for a local prostitute. Played by Gordon Lam, a.k.a. Lam Ka-tung, with a madcap no-off-button energy that starts to grate before long, the Master is convinced that he can intervene to alter fate.  

It doesn’t go well for the woman, however, who falls victim to a serial killer (Peter Chan Charm-man) with a professorial look and an attaché case full of sharp tools. Also on the scene is creepy psychopath Siu Tung (actor and pop singer Lokman Yeung) who is turned on by the carnage, and, before long, a veteran police detective (Berg Ng) who once put Siu Tung away for cat murder.

The set-up is intriguing, but that’s as far as Mad Fate gets with anything resembling a compelling storyline. For the next hour and a bit, all we get are variations on the Master desperately trying to reprogramme the fate he predicts for Siu Tung – that he will graduate from sadistic voyeurism to murder – while equally desperately trying to hold on to his sanity.

Some dodgy effects work is at its most absurd in an animatronic cat – one so clearly fake we guess it’s meant to raise a laugh. The fact that we’re not actually sure is just one of the many tonal wobbles in a film that is saved only by some lovely camerawork by veteran Hong Kong DoP Cheng Siu-keung and by the performance of relative newcomer Lokman Yeung who manages to bring some real pathos to a difficult, underwritten role.