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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

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Cecilia Choi in a still from Beyond the Dream (category IIB; Cantonese), directed Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai. Terrance Lau co-stars

4/5 stars

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Mental illness and altered psychological states have been popular subjects for bleak human dramas, and served as plot devices to make high-concept crime thrillers or nonsensical horror movies tick. But filmmakers in Hong Kong have rarely come up with nuanced romantic psychodrama to match those of peers in the art-house circuit abroad. Beyond the Dream is a first step towards correcting that.

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.

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