I would not have chosen this drama to watch had I known what it would be like. It took me many months with it on my list before I viewed it. If I am watching an action film, I like action. This is cerebral, slow, detailed, and fascinating. It is also dark, without laying on the dark with a trowel.
This is the story of murder and murderers, staging accidents to kill their target for money. The accidents are balletic in their planning and detail, and merciless. The murderers are meticulous both in planning and execution, quietly professional, and deadly.
Most of the process is watching, thinking, planning, preparing, getting in place and waiting for the right moment. There is a sequence where night after night they are in place, poised and yet have to abort repeatedly, and you find yourself rooting for them to succeed. And when they act, it is a mess, and furious in its violence but yet unemotional in the brutality
One of the team is killed in what appears to be an accident, but the team leader is convinced it was staged, wen wrong, and the target is himself. He obsesses and quietly spirals out of his quiet mind, focussed on identifying the traitor in his team, and the person targeting him. Once he has identified the guy, he watches, listens, tracks his habits, his relationships, and picks his method and his moment.
The end is a form of justice fuelled by anger and grief, quite different from the "accidents" arranged by the hit man, but somehow even he seems to feel it is perfectly appropriate.
This is not a pretty film, it's not exotic. Settings are mostly stark, featureless, rundown and comfortless. Places you would not chose to spend time in. Locations are messy, noisy, dirty, bustling and frantic. The streets of Hong Kong where the ordinary people live and try to make a living are in themselves almost an active character in this drama, everywhere vibrating under the redevelopment which is a constant on one of the most populous islands on the planet, where each square inch is potentially golden. And everywhere, people are seemingly strangely detached from each other, watching things happen to other people, passively, perhaps not even particularly curious. So many people and events seem to be invisible yet the street is everywhere.
The acting is incredible. The cast is small, dialogue sparse and functional, and performances quiet. But I completely believed them all. The actors present in the final scene completely inhabited the shocking event, pitching their expressions perfectly to illustrate the shock, grief and release of those last moments, without any overstatement or even the slightest out of place drop of sweat.
When a film performs as perfectly as this one does, the direction is always impeccable.