ReviewCoffin Homes movie review: Fruit Chan horror comedy takes aim at Hong Kong’s property speculation frenzy
- This satire on Hongkongers’ irrational behaviour in the face of soaring real estate market prices has a wild and surreal tone throughout
- Although lacking genuine scares, its plentiful digs at the city’s political and economic realities will keep fans of Chan’s socially conscious movies happy
3/5 stars
The poor exploit the poor to survive while the rich kill each other to get even richer in Coffin Homes, Fruit Chan Gor’s satire on Hongkongers’ irrational response to endlessly soaring real estate market prices.
Both funny and sad, it offers the bitterest indictment of the city’s widening class divide. Bizarrely, Chan delivers this social criticism within the framework of a “splatstick” horror comedy.
The movie’s wild and sometimes surreal tone is set in the opening scene, when the dying matriarch of a wealthy family (Susan Siu Yam-yam) literally turns into a monster and kills four of her five adult children in grotesque fashion – after the quartet try to sell her villa.
The efforts of the surviving daughter (Loletta Lee Lai-chun) to bury the bodies and evaluate the property make up one of the film’s three plot strands.
In the main storyline, Chan regular Wong You-nam plays Jimmy, a struggling property agent who spends his nights squatting in an empty Mid-Levels flat he’s supposed to help sell – never mind that the ghost of its owner (Paul Che Bo-law), a butcher who murdered and dismembered his wife there, opposes its sale.