Behind the Shadows movie review: Louis Koo plays detective in Malaysia-set murder thriller
3/5 stars
Louis Koo Tin-lok, the Hong Kong film industry's most prolific star and
arguably its most influential investor too, puts his signature blend of deadpan charisma and dramatic intensity to fine use in Behind the Shadows, the first Malaysian production of his company One Cool Film.
A character-driven detective thriller that shows a fascination with cheating wives and jilted husbands, the film sees Koo play a hardbitten private investigator who, while running away from his own marriage, must track down a serial killer who seems to bear a grudge against unfaithful women.
Life has not gone the way he would have liked for Au Yeung Wai-yip (Koo), a Hong Kong detective who believes he threw away a successful career when he moved to Malaysia to marry Kuan Weng-sam (Chrissie Chau Sau-na), a Malaysian-Chinese woman he met years earlier in Hong Kong.
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Now resigned to handling unremarkable cases that often involve adultery, Au Yeung is nonetheless shocked when a travel agency boss shows up at his office one day and commissions him to look into the personal life of Kuan, who the client says is his girlfriend of three months.
This new development in his ongoing midlife crisis distracts Au Yeung from a missing-person case at the worst possible moment. The consequences prove to be dire when the woman he has been tailing becomes the latest casualty in a series of grisly murders that are plaguing a town.
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