PORT OF CALL is based on the true event in Hong Kong about a grisly body-dismembered homicide of a 16-year-old girl Jiamei (Li, a stunner in her first film role with a greatly affecting performance juggling evenly with emotional range and starlet innocence),directed by indigenous new blood Philip Yung, his third feature. The film was a major contender in 2015 Golden Horse Film Festival (9 nominations with only 1 win),and consecutively took home 7 awards out of 13 nominations in 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards (a slam dunk of 5 acting categories apart from Yung's screenplay and the legendary cinematographer Doyle).

The story takes two main paralleled narratives interweaving within each other, one is centered on Jiamei before her startling demise, a mainland Chinese girl who arrives in Hong Kong to live with her mother May (Jin) and stepfather (Tam Ping-man),she is identified as those immigrants who fantasize a new life and fortune in this economic hub, Jiamei aims to be model like most comely young girls, but she finds that dream has become ever volatile because the challenge of merging herself into Hong Kong's metropolitan mores is so testing, it is not just about speaking fluent Cantonese, it is everything that surrounds her strapped life, thus, out of expediency, she chooses to become a call girl, to earn fast money and maybe she still has a chance to find someone who will honestly reciprocate her feelings, which doesn't happen in her case, hurt, jaded and disillusioned, she meets another client Tsz-Chung (Ning, a theatrical hand in his film debut),a corpulent delivery driver whose own misanthropic personality has its deeply discomforting trajectory, then Jiamei's story reaches its premature coda out of her own will. Yung truly takes no prisoners in expounding the macabre minutiae of the procedures of the dismemberment through Ning's superbly engrossing narration, imparted with astounding gravitas and foregrounded by the subliminally pervading susurrus soundtrack by indie musician Ding Ke. Jiamei and Tsz-Chung completely shatter the stereotype of victim and predator, two equally lonely souls have no way out in an increasingly materialistic world.

The cynosure of the other narrative bifurcation is Detective Chong (Kwok),who is investigating the murder case with his sidekick Smokey (Patrick Tam),consoles a grief-ridden May (Elaine Jin is an endearing marvel to behold) and wonders the motivation behind the crime, Yung doesn't choose to propel the story as a gripping whodunit, Tsz-Chung turns himself in to the police in the early stage of the interlacing storyline.

Chong's backstory is obviously less lurid in comparison, a divorcé but still keeps amicable relations with his ex (Leung) and daughter, habitually asks others to take photos of him in the crime scene for his own collection, and collapses in his sinking-too-deep involvement of Jiamei's fate. A salt- and-pepper Kwok finally decides to enact a character reflecting his real age on the screen, he was almost 50 when making the film and has been mostly admired for his good-looks and ever-so- young physiognomy, there is an in-joke between Chong and his superior Madam Law (Shiu),when the latter teases him that his skin starts to become flabby, so he orders a facial-tightening product consequentially.

That is the only light touch in this granted perturbing social critique of Hong Kong's underbelly among those in the lower rung, which also rams home its message of the discrepancy between those born in HK and those who are relocated, the former priggishly looks down on the latter whereas the latter desperately emulates the former in order to cash in any possible financial reward in that fertile land. Indeed, the reality is bleak and the gap seemingly irreconcilable, PORT OF CALL might cash in a tad on the tabloid nature of its source story, but at least it rounds off as a contemplating and piquant contemporary urban horror, without any pretentious frills to make itself easier to digest for a wide audience, a true cineaste treat from a place where its own identity is currently experiencing a substantial reconstruction and its cinematic soil is in dire demand of inspiration and integrity.

'Port of Call' belongs to that rare breed of Hong Kong film that strives to be social commentary. Indeed, that shouldn't come as something surprising for those who have seen writer/ director Philip Yung's previous two works, 'Glamourous Youth' and 'May We Chat'. Here, Yung dramatically raises the stakes by basing his story on a gruesome, real-life murder case which shocked the nation back in 2008, so like its real-life inspiration, 'Port' revolves around the murder of a young girl that draws three distinct individuals together.

On the first hand is 16-year-old Wang Jiamei (Jessie Li),who moves to Hong Kong in 2009 to live with her mother, stepfather and older biological sister. Over the course of a fractured narrative divided into three chapters, we will come to learn of Jiamei's ambitions to be a model that led to her auditioning for a dodgy talent company which uses her not as a photo-model but as talent scout, and how that eventually leads her to become a 'paid escort' so she doesn't have to ask her mother for money for material stuff she wants to buy. In particular, her life of prostitution leads her to fall in love with a bookish but nonetheless handsome-looking twenty- something who promptly throws her under the bus when he is confronted by his girlfriend, leaving her emotionally devastated and emptier than ever before.

The next character we are asked to pay attention to is Ting Tsz- chung (stage actor Michael Ning in his bigscreen debut),a stocky short- fused meat deliveryman who also happens to be a triad member. Very early on, the tenement house where Ting lives is the site of a grisly murder where the victim was dismembered and subsequently disposed of in various locations all over town, and Ting turns himself in shortly after to confess his role in killing Jiamei after a drug-addled night of paid sex where Jiamei asks Ting to murder her. The whodunit isn't what Yung is after here; rather, the second chapter entitled 'A Lonely Person' in particular tells of how Ting was unceremoniously dumped not long before he meets Jiamei by a girl whom he had a sweet and soft spot for.

Finally, there is Chong-sir (Aaron Kwok),a Regional Crimes Bureau detective assigned to Jiamei's case with his partner Smoky (Patrick Tam). Like Kwok's recent 'detective' roles, this one comes with its own quirks – not only is his physical appearance, complete with an unflattering crop of graying hair, rumpled clothes and ill-fitting glasses, slightly disorientating to say the least, Chong-sir loves to take his own picture using a Polaroid camera at murder scenes and the homes of other people he interviews as part of the investigation. As much as Jiamei's is an open-and-shut case, Chong- sir is intrigued by just how a young girl like Jiamei would end up in such a predicament, that curiosity driven in part by his own role as a father.

Like we said earlier, Yung chooses to tell his tale by moving back and forth in time, and that choice of narrative structure does take some time to get used to, to say the very least. As its title suggests, the first chapter 'Seeking Mei' is probably the most disjointed, comprised of scenes that do not intuitively gel with each other; the middle chapter gets slightly more coherent, in part because it is also where the past and present timelines meet and things happen in a more linear fashion. But altogether, the film demands a fair bit of patience and focus on the part of its viewer to keep seemingly disparate events in mind with the promise that it will all start to make sense towards the end.

Amidst the somewhat uneven and inconsistent pacing however is an absolutely consistent sense of ennui, sadness and even anguish. Jiamei, Ting and Chong-sir are all lonely individuals in their own way – one who finds her hopes of companionship dashed by a 'bastard', one who finds his feelings unreciprocated, and one who has become estranged from his wife (now ex-wife) and daughter over the years because of his work. The world they inhabit is similarly bleak, captured by cinematographer Christopher Doyle in all its harsh beauty whether the gritty alleys or cramped working-class apartments where isolated souls are faced with their own misery.

Especially defined with acute poignancy is Jiamei's growing disillusion with life, meant undoubtedly as a symbol of a whole segment of youth who are searching for purpose and fulfilment in their lives but who come out empty. That we feel so deeply for Jiamei is also credit to newcomer Jessie Li's heartfelt performance, conveying her character's fragility, melancholy, desolation and eventual despair as a result of her displaced upbringing as well as her displacement from society. Li is matched by an equally gripping performance by Ning, who brings pathos to his loner character so that we feel for Ting than regard him as a psychopath.

That's not to say that the film is perfect; that it most certainly isn't, and for one, it isn't hard to imagine a much more powerful film if the storytelling were more focused and the characters more well-defined. Yet there is something hypnotic and mesmerising about it, about the way it portrays the state of disfranchised youth in society, about how it gives voice to their frustrations, anxieties and hopelessness, and most of all about how relevant it is. It is for these reasons that 'Port of Call' stays with you long after the credits are over, provoking you to think about the Jiameis and Tings in our midst and what we can do to avoid the tragedy that brought this film to being in the first place. It may not be the best Hong Kong film you'll see this year (notwithstanding its official submission by the territory to the Oscars),but it is probably one of the most significant.

Nominated for 8 Golden Horse Awards and it is HK's entry for the Best Foreign Film Award, but seriously I don't get what the hullabaloo is about. Let me count the ways it failed - unevenly paced, oddly edited, directed without clarity, unnecessary fractured timelines, characters feel like walking enigmas. Only they know what they are doing. I didn't care for anyone. I think it is a veiled attempt at social commentary about the state of lonely youths in HK but the characters are not drawn well. The movie does not strive on suspense and we know who the murderer is pretty soon. The film then delves into their motivations but as far as I can tell every character is only painted with one identifiable trait. Getting Aaron Kwok here to be driving force is a waste of talent and I can't understand what's the point of him taking Polaroids and playing that damn kendama toy. I hate it when filmmakers do these dumb stuff and expect us to derive a deep reason about it. Scene to scene, the transitions feel unwieldy. Sometimes odd characters parachute in to pay some lip service and suggest some depth. Yawn! And I hate it when there are false endings. I think there are 3 here. It felt like it didn't want to end.

I do like Christopher Doyle's cinematography in that he refuses to pick up anything glamorous about HK. Jessie Li and Michael Ning as the killed and killer are laudable. Finally the movie doesn't shy away from some grisly gore. Something I don't see often in HK movies.

PS - I googled the actual case which is just grisly. A 16-year-old girl got chop into pieces by a 24-year-old man. Go wiki Wong Ka Mui