Review | Beyond the Dream film review: mesmerising romantic psychodrama by Ten Years director starring Cecilia Choi and Terrance Lau
- Cecilia Choi, in her first Hong Kong film, and Terrance Lau, in his first big-screen role, star in a Hong Kong rarity – a nuanced romantic psychodrama
- One has a deeply flawed personality, the other an unreliable mental state. We could say more, but Kiwi Chow’s film is best seen without knowing its story
4/5 stars
A fairy-tale urban romance complicated by one party’s unreliable mental state and the other’s seriously flawed personality, this thoroughly captivating film is the second full-length feature by Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai, who directed and produced the film and co-wrote its screenplay. Chow made his directing debut with 2013’s A Complicated Story, before contributing the prophetic segment Self-Immolator to Ten Years , the 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards best picture.
Adapted from Chow’s award-winning short film Upstairs (2006), Beyond the Dream is best viewed with no prior knowledge of its story – you are encouraged to stop reading here and watch the film first.
It begins with a chance encounter on the street between recovering schizophrenic Lee Chi-lok (Terrance Lau Chun-him) and a kind and beautiful woman (Cecilia Choi Si-wan), who Lok soon learns is named Yan-yan, and is a neighbour in his public housing estate.