Mad Fate, the latest from Limbo director Soi Cheang and produced by Johnnie To, is a mean-spirited, nasty crime drama that tries too hard to execute its ridiculous superstition-laden premise, following its soulless characters trying to fool God in a hyper-violent depressing cartoon. It's best enjoyed ironically for its warped bent view of humanity.
San, a fortune teller meets Siu Dong, a cafe delivery boy who possesses a burning psychopathic desire for murder. Siu Dong has a criminal record of assault and animal abuse. Through San's calculations, the boy is destined to spend life in prison for a brutal murder that's due to happen.
San proceeds to help Siu Dong through Feng Shui rituals and practices, guiding him to be a good person and steering him away from his fate. Will the boy change his fate? Or is San just crazy?
Mad Fate's premise and execution are contradictory from the get-go. It wants to build an ambiguity about Feng Shui but then presents it as fact.
To properly ground its premise, writers Yau Nai-hoi and Melvin Li's script suggests that Gordon Lam's fortune teller could be going crazy, from having a family history of mental illness. However, the script blows this out of the water.
Gordon Lam's fortune teller proves to be scientifically correct in his fortune-telling readings to a blatantly accurate degree. San can calculate where people will be geographically whenever he needs to chat with them. San regularly screams at God, represented as the sun in the creamy clouds above (the same one from Soi Cheang's Accident), which appears to be silently mocking him.
This lack of solid foundation launches the story into utter ridiculousness. We are really watching a movie about a superstitious man trying to best God and it's too far-fetched of a concept to suspend disbelief for.
Roland Emmerich's Moonfall asked the audience to entertain Hollow Moon conspiracy theories to follow its sci-fi story. Mad Fate asks the audience to raise their superstitions to believe that Feng Shui can change the fate of a psychopathic killer.
Soi Cheang's trademark gritty graphic novel aesthetic eliminates subtext, or hope. There's a morbid sense of malaise in the air where the most cynical thing you can think of about humanity is immediately played out violently.
I hated the characters and the world this film is trying hard to manufacture. It artificially tries to make the audience feel awful and hopeless, but it sinfully forgets to add heart.
I was disengaged from frame one but out of curiosity, watched how far it took its premise. I forgot the ending a day after.
