Directors: Kwok Ka-Hei, Jack Lee Chun-Kit
Writers: Kwok Ka-Hei, Jack Lee Chun-Kit, Devon Choi Ka-Hang, Ho Siu-Hong, Yung Ka-Ching
Stars: Kenny Wong Tak-Ban, Ling Man-Leung, Renci Yeung
Synopsis: An influencer couple staged a harmless prank in pursuit of clicks and likes. Little do they know, their little escapade has gone out of control and spiraled into a real tragedy.
Each year, the Fantasia International Film Festival gives out the Cheval Noir award, based on a competition of about twelve to fourteen feature films that are supposed to highlight the very best that genre cinema can offer. “Supposed to,” because the first film shown in competition this year, Unidentified Murder, is one of the most unwatchable things I’ve ever seen at this storied festival and begins Fantasia’s main competition with a relatively sour taste in the mouth, when it should instead evoke strong emotions from ourselves.
It’s a real shame, because audiences need to be exposed to modern-day Hong Kong cinema, but there isn’t anything in this overlong 86-minute meta found-footage comedy that works, starting with a garish cold open that seemingly uses generative AI to create images that look synthetic. Reports online on its alleged use are conflicted – some Hong Kong reviewers have indeed said the film uses AI, while directors Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have talked about the proliferation of the technology while not explicitly confirming it was used for the movie. However, the feeling was present that these images were not created by human hands, in its first two minutes, and that was already enough to sour my viewing experience.
If there isn’t AI used, it doesn’t really matter, because the film is still bad. It attempts to be a heightened “prank within-a-prank-within-a-prank” movie, but its structure begins to fall flat on its face almost immediately, where nothing new is actively being added to the film’s repetitive conceit. Essentially, it’s about a couple who wants to stage a prank on the same site where a child went missing, and the rest is so terribly written that it won’t take long for anyone (or you) to check out. While it might have interesting ideas at play about the rot at the center of influencer culture that is now permeating basically every single aspect of our everyday lives, both Kwok and Jack do nothing of interest to explore any of these ideas beyond their main narrative, which gets repeated ad nauseam until the biggest whimper of all endings.
There’s so much to say right now about influencers, especially in the wake of them invading all aspects of pop culture, not just in film, but also in marketing campaigns for sports, politics, and fashion. Unidentified Murder seems to take inspiration from the incident that made Logan Paul infamous, but doesn’t dare take a position on what it’s showing. Its brand of humor is offbeat, sure, yet the jokes rarely – if ever – land. Once it begins to repeat what we’ve seen before and show new angles of the prank, the movie loses steam so quickly that any interest we might have had about these self-centered characters immediately dissipates, and all we want to do is leave the cinema as soon as humanly possible.
The actors might be giving their all, but they are serving a screenplay that gives them nothing to work with. Just one painfully unfunny situation after the next that makes you think the directors are stretching their runtime to fill dead air. In fact, this is essentially Dead Air: The Movie, a film that thinks it’s funny by repeating the same joke endlessly and making you believe an 86-minute runtime is longer than all of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy combined. It’s even worse when the film’s visual language is neither appealing nor inventive, even when it shows us the multiple camera angles that will be used to capture the “prank.”
A movie devoid of any interest at the world’s biggest genre film festival is always disappointing, but it was bound to happen eventually. With Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, we might have cleared the worst of this (very) long festival and hope that whatever I see next will be much better than the first title vying for the Cheval Noir award out of the gate. There are some definitely good-looking movies playing next, and there’s hope that this 30th edition of Fantasia will pick up much sooner than later, or else it’s going to be an interminable three weeks full of promising – but ultimately disappointing – genre offerings within the Concordia walls.
