Back Home is the kaleidoscopic and ambitious feature debut from Hong Kong director Nate Ki, who showcases his ability to create a truly horrific and suspenseful atmosphere. Ki’s passion and admiration for horror and folklore have concocted a craft that combines realistic and supernatural terror elements.
Wing (Anson Kong of the popular Cantopop group Mirror) fled his native Hong Kong to Canada to escape his traumatic childhood and repress his ghost-seeing abilities. This is short-lived as Wing is summoned back to his homeland to confront his supernatural capabilities after his mentally ill mother’s suicide attempt leaves her in a coma. Wing revisits his childhood home, a sketchy, worn and dull high-rise building that is plagued with his childhood trauma and occult entities. Wing’s “third eye” is reopened when he witnesses eerie, violent and grotesque happenings that take place within his dishevelled apartment complex and the peculiar tenants within it.
The enchanting fusion of horror and ancient Chinese folklore allows Ki to explore the concept of superstitious fears and the ultimate destruction that they can cause. The movie begins with Wing’s once successful Peking opera singing but now paranoid and deranged mother Tang Wai-Lan, (Bai Ling), inconsolable as she hits and beats him due to his cursed supernatural ability. A tall black entity, depicting a mogwai, looms behind her watching the violence it created unfold. Lin’s helplessness and fear of social rejection resort her to seeking aid from religious officials to expel Wing’s devilish abilities by him being spanked with a scalding katana.
Ling becomes a vessel of superstitious fear and paranoia and we see her unleash this both verbally and physically upon Wing, as she blames him for her mental, social and financial decline. We witness the severe psychotic break of Ling while in her Peking opera attire and makeup, as Ki depicts her as some ungodly and destructive entity, created by Wing’s clairvoyance.
Ki embroiders political and social commentary within this piece, allowing the dilapidated apartment complex to become a character within itself as it embodies and symbolises the housing and economic crisis that looms throughout its narrative. The building becomes a space for both the living and the dead and we witness the interactions and events that take place with the interaction of these living and supernatural outcasts. The seventh floor is presented almost like some form of purgatory, as multiple unspeakable sins are committed through nauseating angles and devious red lighting.
An interesting event that Back Home allows Ki to explore is the odd surge in charcoal burning, a suicide method that emerged in Hong Kong during the economic recession. It became the third most common suicide method, predominately carried out by those in financial and economic turmoil. Ki uses this to showcase the lack of public health services and aid to the financially and economically deprived.
Back Home is an impressive feature debut that explores and experiments with classic horror tropes and Chinese folklore, Ki uses this attention-grabbing genre to provide a critique on the political and economic failures within Hong Kong. After each watch, I managed to find something that I had not seen before like a looming dark entity, a subtle jab to the political state, or a piece of ancient Chinese folklore that I was unfamiliar with. All in all, Back Home offers something to everyone, a thrilling horror experience, an informative critique of the state, and hypnotising dark mythology.
This film was viewed as part of the Dublin International Film Festival’s Making Waves: Navigators of Hong Kong Cinema Programme
