Film Review: Ciao UFO 再見UFO (2026) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
There is a moment early in Ciao UFO when three kids stand on a rooftop in Wah Fu Estate and watch something they cannot name cross the sky. The light is ordinary and impossible at the same time. Patrick Leung holds the shot just long enough for us to feel the exact second childhood ends — not with a bang, but with a question that will never quite leave them. That is the whole movie, really.
Leung, who waited eight years to get this film into theatres, has made something rarer than a science-fiction picture. He has made a memory. The UFO is never explained, and thank God for that. It is simply the thing they saw together before the city changed around them, before the 80s hope curdled into 90s restlessness and then into the pale, exhausted 2000s. When the three friends meet again as adults — Chui Tien-you, Charlene Choi and Wong You-nam, all of them carrying the weight of lives that did not turn out as planned — they no longer recognise each other, or Hong Kong. The question they keep circling is the same one the kids asked on that rooftop: What was that light?
The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they saw it together. Leung and cinematographer Leung Ming-kai shoot Wah Fu Estate like a lost country. The stairwells, the playgrounds, the sea beyond the blocks — these are not nostalgic postcards. They are the last places where these people still knew who they were. The adult scenes have a different texture: flatter light, tighter frames, the slight awkwardness of people who have practised being strangers. The film hops across years without announcing itself, the way memory does. One minute you are ten years old on a rooftop. The next you are thirty and cannot remember why you stopped looking up.
Charlene Choi is especially fine. She has always been able to suggest a private weather system behind the smile; here the weather has turned. Wong You-nam plays the one who stayed closest to the original dream and paid for it. Chui Tien-you, the most restless of the three, carries the film’s quietest heartbreak — the realisation that you can outgrow a place and still be defined by it. Michelle Wai is also excellent as the love interest along the journey.
This is not a perfect film. A few transitions feel abrupt, and the score occasionally underlines what the images have already said. But perfection would have been the wrong ambition. Ciao UFO is about the mess of growing up inside a city that was growing up at the same time, and sometimes growing away from you. It understands that the most painful goodbyes are the ones you don’t notice happening until years later.
I left the cinema thinking about the last line, spoken by the youngest of them: they never saw another UFO, but he hopes they might. That hope is the film’s real special effect. It is small, stubborn, and completely human.
Roger used to say that movies are machines for generating empathy. This one works. It made me miss a version of Hong Kong I never lived in, and a version of myself I only half remember. That is more than most films manage. Look to the stars, the poster says.
Better advice: look at the people standing next to you when the light appears. They are the only proof it ever happened. (Neo, 2026)