Review of Dream Home (2010) by Robert B — 28 Mar 2012

Wai dor lei ah yut ho (Ho-cheung Pang, 2010).

I wanted to like this movie (English title: Dream Home) quite a bit more than I actually did, but it suffers from a few too many flaws for that. Still, for someone with just the right sense of humor, this would probably be right up your alley, and enough glimmers of what could have been come through that the average filmgoer (at least, the average filmgoer who can stand movie screens awash in gore) will at least not think it sucks.

Plot: As we open, Lai-sheung Cheng (Contagion's Josie Ho) is sneaking into a building's security room and offing the guard. After which we jump back to her at her desk, working a phone bank, trying to sell stuff. (This time shuffle is likely to confuse you for well over half the film unless you read something that tells you what the filmmaker is doing. It's not handled well at all, and this is the movie's main flaw.) Lai-sheung has craved an apartment in Victoria Harbor, an ultra-swank Hong Kong waterfront apartment building. She works two jobs, spends just enough to keep herself alive, and is deeply in debt, trying to save up the $800,000 she'll need for an efficiency. When one comes open, she jumps at the chance-but thanks to an act-of-god style timing mishap, she misses an appointment with the sellers and they tell her agent they're thinking of offering the apartment to someone else. This would be a spoiler if every major review, the movie's press packet, etc. hadn't all spelled it out before me: Lai-sheung snaps, breaks into the building, and starts killing people in order to get her hands on that apartment. The real estate game in Hong Kong really is that deadly.

The movie, the first for Ho's production company 852 Films, came out to mixed reviews that all said basically the same thing I was thinking while I watched it: there are two halves to this movie, the gore film and the satire on Hong Kong real estate, and the two don't mesh all that well. I think a lot of this has to do the the confusing time-shifting I mentioned in the plot synopsis; had that been handled a little better, this probably would have been a stronger movie than it is. Once you understand what's going on there, things come together and the movie picks up; maybe by telling you what's going on from the outset I'll have made it so you will get more out of the first half-hour-ish of this movie than you otherwise would. ***.