Night and Fog (2009) User Reviews

Domestic violence is not a joke

[Genkinchan · 8/10 · 11 July 2022]

Let me start off by saying Simon Yam brings a lot to the table in this movie as the violent husband.. the wife also indeed put on a great show acting wise it was near perfection... both of them should win an award for their respective roles....

But the story line time line is way to confusing bring it back and forth and back and forth.. until I was so confuse whether the story line was in the past or present... the reason I rated it higher was because only of the performances by all the actor & actress plus the gruesome action and violent scene.

Great performances, very sad tale. Based on a true story.

[sitenoise · 10/10 · 9 June 2010]

Stories of domestic abuse are often so unreal or surreal, if/when they are made into movies they often come off as unbelievable or too melodramatic, leaving the facts of the case alone to provide the emotional impact. The aesthetics of the film itself seem less of a priority. The acting and direction of Night and Fog are so pitch perfect, that even though the story starts at the end so we know the result and it's unraveled through flashbacks and police interrogations, it plays out like a mystery. It's not the what of what happened but the how of what happened that compels. And don't write off Jingchu Zhang as just another pretty face. She nails the part of an ambitious peasant girl from the heartland, in this case Sichuan, who appears to have made it to the top by marrying a Hong Kong man. Her sisters made it only halfway, marrying men from the industrial Shenzhen. This is the ladder of success many young women from the disadvantaged rural areas attempt to climb. No matter that many of the men they pursue, especially the ones from Hong Kong, might already have a wife.

Director Ann Hui places the micro of domestic abuse into a wider macro social context with such honesty it's scary. The film reveals a plight of a segment of the Chinese population it hurts to know about. Hui pushes hard on the social buttons of an issue that many would like to ignore, but that's what gives the film its power. This is one of the more painfully sad films I've seen in a long time. I put it on when it was already way past my bed time, thinking I'd just get a feel for it and fall asleep. Well, a feel for it I got, and ended up staring at it, bug-eyed, the entire two hour runtime.

Harrowing...but worth every minute!

[lyx-1 · 10/10 · 29 March 2013]

By introducing the ending at the beginning of the film, the Director Ann Hui cleverly focuses on the unfolding of a family tragedy and the deterioration of a fraught relationship. The result is an extremely powerful drama, delivered by an astonishing cast. Simon Yam and Zhang Jingchu are simply BRILLIANT...I can't even describe their performance with words. If you are a genuine cinema verite fan, this cannot be missed, it will be a great pity if this film is avoided because of the subject matter, as it is a lot more. Its impact on me is not unlike The Bicycle Thief, and its quality on par with other cinematic greats. It is really such shame that this film does not get the exposure it deserves.

Gloomy and Gloomy - Review of "Night and Fog"

[kampolam-75813 · 5/10 · 23 January 2023]

In 2008, Ann Hui On-Wah won many awards for "The Way We Are", and Paw Hee-Ching successfully won the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actress, although it was a belated honor for her acting career. But her performance in the film is truly impressive. The second part of the film, "Night and Fog" was released in mid-2009.(The Chinese names of the two films, "Day and Night in Tin Shui Wai" and "Night and Fog in Tin Shui Wai", are two completely different stories, but both take place in Tin Shui Wai, so they are regarded as two-part works) "The Way We Are" describes the life of an ordinary family in Tin Shui Wai, showing Hong Kong people's pursuit of "abundant life" with peace of mind, the high realm of dignity in simplicity, and the virtue of mutual help and love among neighbors, dating back to the 60s and 70s of the last century, Hong Kong people were content and the core value of running around in life. The high realm of the film and the realistic style of using the camera to capture the details of life are almost perfect performances in Ann Hui's films. In the second part, Ann Hui returned to the real-life drama format of adapting real cases, and tried to reconstruct this domestic violence incident that caused a sensation in Hong Kong based on the tragedy of Lee Sam (played by Simon Yam Tat-Wah) and Wong Hiu-Ling (played by Zhang Jingchu), the old husband and young wife. The film deliberately went through the process of police investigation and questioning, in the mouths of neighbor, friend of the shelter center, and others, they described the ins and outs of Lee Sam and Wong Hiu-Ling, the protagonists of the tragedy.

The film is reminiscent of Ann Hui's debut work "The Secret" (1979), but this time she pursued a near-surreal psychological description in a realistic style. The results are not outstanding, but it can be seen that Ann Hui does not want to be restricted by the real case, and hopes to express her views on these two tragic characters in a film that she thinks is more real. Perhaps, the realistic style of the film is not like the suspense drama of "The Secret", allowing Ann Hui to infer the appearance of the case that is close to "real" through dialectical descriptions from multiple angles like "Rashomon" (1950). Although Simon Yam played the "bad man" criticized by the media on that day. Ann Hui gave this character a more reasonable description in the film, which gave the audience a sympathetic and different view of this character; and Zhang Jingchu who plays Wong Hiu-Ling, as a new immigrant, is in a dilemma of hesitation and helplessness. Ann Hui's mental journey of chasing the role through memories, a section in the Sichuan countryside is the most touching, but the film does not explain how she and her husband met? What is she doing in Shenzhen? The blank of this point may be constrained by the character as a tragic character who is widely sympathized. Although the film uses a more dimensional treatment to show the tragedy, the helplessness of Zhang Jingchu's role is not fully expressed.

The film's critical attitude towards social workers, police and other institutional roles, Ann Hui's return to the era of Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) TV dramas, the help given by the establishment to weak groups is actually insignificant, and they still rely on mutual help and themselves to solve their predicament, which is actually the same as the attitude of "The Way We Are", but the realm shown in "The Way We Are", "Night and Fog" is caught in the entanglement of political orientation and morality.

By Kam Po LAM (original in Chinese)