Limbo

Rookie policeman Will Ren and his partner, the veteran cop Cham Lau, are pursuing an obsessive and especially brutal murderer of women. To lure this “hand-fetish” ripper, they use the criminal Wong To, who needs to atone for causing an accident involving Cham’s family, as bait. But this young woman is both unpredictable and insubordinate. Surrounded by ever more insane bouts of violence and increasingly in danger of falling victim to the bestial serial killer herself, she fights the traumas of the slums by her own means. The ultra-long showdown really packs a punch: if you don’t shudder, you’ll scream. Alongside the great cast, the trademarks of Hong Kong genre filmmaker Soi Cheang (Dog Bite Dog) include his brilliantly cool observation of well-honed cop rituals – at times condensed into a one-shot-per-second montage, at others edited at a more leisurely pace – as well as close-ups of those struggling to survive amid the city’s trash heaps. Making use of monochrome, “hidden object” aesthetics, the film probes the boundaries of the bearable, traversing them experimentally with excesses of violence, subtle gender-bending and tender gestures in a world that has lost its humanity. (Berlinale)