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Edmund Lee

4/5 stars
The intricacies of family ties and the burden of traditional customs weigh heavily on the protagonists of The Last Dance, a life-affirming gem of a film that is set around Hong Kong’s funeral trade and features two comedy icons, Dayo Wong Tze-wah and Michael Hui Koon-man, in purely dramatic roles.
Coming off starring roles in two of the highest-grossing Hong Kong films of all time, in Table for Six (2022) and A Guilty Conscience (2023), Wong may well pull off a box-office hat trick with his understated part as Dominic, an out-of-work wedding planner who has been in serious debt after his company was sunk by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Upon taking over the Hung Hom shop of a retiring funeral agent as a last resort to stay afloat, Dominic is not just unnerved by the morbid enterprise – which often involves handling the departed’s remains – but also struggles to win over his new business partner Master Man (Hui in great form), a stern Taoist priest in his eighties.


Dominic’s eagerness to meet all his clients’ wishes is initially greeted with contempt by Man – although the former’s resolve to satisfy a most unconventional request from a grieving mother (Rosa Maria Velasco) appears to have opened the old man’s eyes to the true value of their work: to comfort the living.
Meanwhile, Man’s relationships with his two children are strained. His married son Ben (Chu Pak-hong), who has long blamed Man for making him a Taoist priest, dreams of leaving the nest, while the younger child, daughter Yuet (Michelle Wai Sze-nga), a paramedic who once idolised her father, now numbs herself with casual sex.
When Anselm Chan Mou-yin made his directorial debut with 2021’s Ready or Knot, this reviewer was alarmed by its peddling of the worst gender clichés. It is thus with some amazement that I find The Last Dance, Chan’s third feature, to be one of the best women’s empowerment films Hong Kong cinema has seen.
This is partly helped by a career-best performance from Wai, whose conflicted character looks on as her brother enjoys all the attention of their fiercely traditional father, while having to live with Man’s culturally ingrained misogyny – “the ancestors said women are filthy”, he repeatedly declares.


The screenplay, co-written by Chan and Cheng Wai-kei, does an exquisite job of asking numerous existential questions, from the limits of family responsibility to the meaning of life itself, without ever sliding into outright sentimentality.
The film’s Chinese title, “Break Hell’s Gates”, refers to a Taoist funeral ritual meant to liberate the souls of the dead and help them achieve reincarnation. Chan has adopted it as a metaphor for the survivors’ need to find peace in life – a blunt message that is conveyed delicately throughout this engrossing drama.
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Comic actors excel in purely dramatic roles, but Michelle Wai steals the show in an engrossing film that champions female empowerment


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Review

Review | The Last Dance movie review: Dayo Wong, Michael Hui impress in exquisite funeral drama

Comic actors excel in purely dramatic roles, but Michelle Wai steals the show in an engrossing film that champions female empowerment