16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
How Hong Kong director Ringo Lam freshened up the crime genre with Victim and Triangle
Ringo Lam Ling-tung, who died in 2018, was best known for his early films like the trendsetting City on Fire.
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But the Hong Kong director, who
would not compromise his vision in the face of commercial concerns, delivered high-quality work throughout his career.
Here we look at two of Lam's lesser-seen mid-period works.
1. Victim (1999)
Victim was an attempt by Lam to inject his crime thrillers with a new dimension: the supernatural.
This was not a completely new genre for Lam; his 1983 movie debut Esprit D'amour was a romantic ghost story. But since the success of 1987's
City on Fire , he had concentrated mainly on gritty crime stories.
The film, which stars
Lau Ching-wan
Tony Leung Ka-fai and Lau's real-life partner Amy Kwok Oi-ming, still unspools like a standard cops-and-robbers story. But Lam buries some spooky elements in the narrative to make the viewer think there may be aspects of demonic possession at work.
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'I'd been thinking about moving away from pure crime for some time,' Lam told critic Derek Elley in 1999, noting that he was a fan of horror classics like The Exorcist and The Omen.
