Film Review: Love Actually… Sucks! 愛很爛 (2011) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 5.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a moment early in Scud’s “Love Actually… Sucks!” when a wedding celebration, brimming with the usual Hong Kong banquet excess, curdles into something far darker. It is the sort of tonal pivot that announces the film’s intentions: this will not be a cheerful valentine. Instead, it is an anti-romance, a deliberate spit in the eye of Richard Curtis’s syrupy 2003 confection of the same name (minus the ellipsis and the profanity). Where that film offered charming coincidences and heartfelt declarations, Scud gives us obsession, betrayal, taboo, and the occasional decapitated head carried along a coastline like some grotesque offering to the sea.
Scud, the provocateur of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, has built a body of work around male desire and its discontents. Here he broadens his canvas. The film unfolds as a series of interconnected stories inspired, we are told, by real court cases—“crimes of the heart” rendered with unflinching carnality. A brother and sister cross a forbidden line. A married painter falls for his male model. A dance instructor tangles with an older and richer student. A lesbian couple plays at roles that fail to satisfy. Heterosexual couplings sit alongside gay ones, and the camera lingers on bodies—male and female, full-frontal and unapologetic—with the clinical curiosity of a scientist who has stopped pretending love is pretty.
The boldness is admirable. In a city and industry still skittish about such matters, Scud refuses to blink. His actors commit fully, baring more than flesh; they offer up vulnerability and, in some cases, genuine pathos. Herman Yau’s cinematography catches the humid, claustrophobic textures of Hong Kong life—the gleaming high-rises and cramped interiors where desire festers. There are individual sequences that crackle with raw energy, moments when the film seems on the verge of saying something profound about how love, in its purest forms, so often curdles into possession or self-destruction.
Yet the film is uneven, as anthologies so frequently are. Some stories land with tragic force; others feel underdeveloped or didactic. The explicitness, while courageous, occasionally crosses into the gratuitous, as if Scud is testing how much the audience can endure rather than illuminating why we should. The interconnected structure strains at times, and the low-budget realities show in pacing and resolution. One leaves the film impressed by its nerve but not entirely moved by its heart—ironic, given the subject.
“Love Actually… Sucks!” is the work of a filmmaker who knows exactly what he is doing and cares little whether you approve. It is not for everyone. It is not even for most. But in its messy, sweaty, confrontational way, it reminds us that love is rarely the tidy, redemptive force Hollywood peddles. More often it is chaotic, painful, and—yes—frequently ridiculous. Scud has captured that truth with courage, if not always with the grace or consistency it deserves. (Neo, 2026)