’Small Hours Of The Night’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr. Daniel Hui. Singapore. 2024. 103mins

The opening moments of Small Hours Of The Night establish a distinctly Kafkaesque environment: a darkened office with an emphasis on limited objects (an ashtray, a rotary telephone, a tape recorder) and unsettling glimpses of a rough corner of the room. This sets the stage for the interrogation of a woman detained for initially unspecified reasons by a man with whom she may share a painful past.

Equal parts political critique, psychological drama and cinematic puzzle

Daniel Hui’s minimalist film draws on true events in Singapore’s history, specifically a 1983 trial which saw the brother of a deceased political dissident prosecuted for providing a ‘subversive’ tombstone inscription. Yet the presentation is studiously unreal. Shot in high contrast black-and-white, this is equal parts political critique, psychological drama and cinematic puzzle.

Showing in Rotterdam’s Harbour Programme, Small Hours Of The Night hails from the innovative film collective 13 Little Pictures, which has produced a number of notable Southeast Asian indies including Yeo Siew Hua’s post-global noir A Land Imagined (2018) and Tan Bee Thiam’s Tati-esque satire Tiong Bahru Social Club (2020) – both of which were acquired by major streamers. Given its austere style and expectation that the viewer is equipped with some knowledge of Singapore’s social-political development, Small Hours Of The Night may be more of a festival item. Nonetheless, it has a chance of piquing the interest of a smaller distributor or platform with experimental leanings. 

This chamber piece occurs within a secluded detainment facility and opens in the middle of a rainy night with an unnamed young man (Irfan Kasban) shrouded in shadow while pensively smoking a cigarette in his office. When prisoner Vicki (Vicki Yang) is escorted in, his demeanour flits between that of interrogator, psychiatrist and bureaucrat as he asks her a series of questions about her troubling behaviour.

Their tense back-and-forth initially dwells on the anxieties of confinement: Vicki has been pacing around her cell after hours and is convinced that there is a new detainee next door, which the man denies. A forthright if fragmented testimony gradually unfolds. Vicki’s account of her political awakening is intertwined with the history of Singapore’s notoriously strict legal system, which has handed down severe penalties for relatively minor offenses or infractions.

As the night draws on, identities and time periods blur to create a sense of temporal displacement. Although an opening title card announces the setting as the late 1960s, contentious legal proceedings of the 1970s and 1980s are referenced, while inconsistencies in Vicki’s experiences indicate that she is a composite of various real-life defendants. This makes the film a uniquely distilled indictment of the system of control utilised by Singapore since 1965, when it separated from Malaysia to gain independence as a country.

Utilising Brechtian distancing in a manner that evokes the 1960s works of Nagisa Oshima, Small Hours Of The Night ruminates on such themes as memory, the law and personal narratives over the course of three extended movements and an epilogue. An illustration of power dynamics and a fusion of identities is achieved by rarely having characters share screen space: Vicky is initially kept off-screen, with the visual focus on the man as he asks questions and reacts to her elucidation of a dream in which she is trapped in a dark hole. When the detainee finally comes into view some 40 minutes in, it’s during a power outage with the room illuminated by hypnosis-inducing swirling search lights from outside. After taking on a physical presence, Vicki asserts her agency in staggered fashion, ultimately expressing defiance against an oppressive regime.

In terms of paranoid atmosphere, Small Hours Of The Night certainly makes the most of presumably limited resources. Looi Wan Ping’s striking chiaroscuro cinematography recalls such black-and-white marvels as Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Suture (1993) and Géla Babluani’s 13 (2005). This heightened visual sensibility is intensified by Akritchalerm Kayalanamitr’s sound design which accentuates the whirring of the tape player, the ticking of a clock and the relentless downpour to intimidating effect.

Despite demonstrating an impressive control of technical elements, Hui’s direction of actors is less successful. Efforts to elicit performances that operate in tandem with the hallucinatory visuals and the often trance-like arrangements of composer Cheryl Ong result in increasingly monotonous line readings. Although a tearfully committed Yang is literally locked-in to her amalgamated protagonist, her almost drone-like delivery may ultimately exasperate viewers who should be enraged by the plight of those she is representing. Consequently, Small Hours Of The Night drags after a suitably arresting opening, but is still commendable as a politically and stylistically bold treatment of history.