Dream Home

Pang Ho-cheung’s gleefully violent Hong Kong horror movie takes a harsh, satirical look at the city’s property market through the eyes of Cheng Lai-sheung (Josie Ho), a hard-working single woman who – while working two jobs, nursing her ill father and having joyless sex with a married man – dreams of buying a tiny apartment with a view of Victoria Harbour. Flashbacks to Lai-sheung’s slum childhood explore the roots of her obsession and help to explain her slide into psychotic violence. Her ruthless strategy is a clever one: by bumping off the occupants of adjoining flats, she hopes to lower the asking price of the one she has her eye on. The film’s homeland release was allegedly delayed by a dispute between director Pang and his lead actor/co-producer Ho, who felt that the extreme violence meted out by her psychotic anti-heroine undercut the audience’s sympathy with her character. It must be said, Ho had a point. For all the film’s bleak ironies, Lai-sheung’s brutal asphyxiation of a pregnant woman, who aborts her child while dying, destroys any residual empathy.