Film Review: Murder 黃蜂尾後針 (1993) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is something quietly cruel about memory. It can be stolen in an instant, and what remains is not always mercy.
Lawrence Cheng’s Murder opens with a shot that should kill. A lawyer named Jessica Yau (Carol Cheng) discovers her husband has been laundering millions for the Thai underworld. He puts a bullet in her head. She lives. The wound leaves her with amnesia, a blank page where her sharp, calculating self used to be. The film then places her in the hands of the one person who has every reason to hate her: a nurse she once destroyed in court.
That premise could have been pure melodrama or cheap revenge. Cheng (who also co-wrote and appears in the film) keeps it colder than expected. The story is less about whether Jessica will remember than about what kind of woman returns when the past begins to surface. Carol Cheng, already a major star by 1993, plays the role with careful restraint. Early on she is almost childlike, soft-spoken, dependent. Later, fragments of the old Jessica flicker back—sharp eyes, a certain ruthlessness—and Cheng lets us feel the unease of watching a personality reassemble itself. It is one of her more interesting dramatic turns, less showy than her comedies, more haunted.
Damian Lau, as the husband, is all surface calm and quiet panic. He is not a cartoon villain. He is a man who made a terrible calculation and now must live inside its consequences. Lau has always been good at playing men who believe they are still in control long after control has slipped away. Here that quality serves him well. The scenes between him and Cheng after the shooting carry a peculiar intimacy: the tenderness of a man who needs his wife alive, and the dread of a man who needs her to stay broken.
Deanie Ip, as the nurse, gives the film its most unsettling energy. She is not simply waiting for revenge; she is studying it, tasting it. Ip was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and the nomination was earned. Her performance has a stillness that makes every small kindness feel potentially lethal.
The film is not perfect. The third act leans harder into thriller mechanics than the earlier, more psychological passages, and some of the plotting feels mechanical once the pieces start clicking into place. Yet the central idea holds: that the most dangerous thing about losing your memory is not the forgetting, but the people who remember you better than you remember yourself.
Murder is a modest film with a sharp little sting. It understands that the past does not always stay buried just because someone put a bullet in your head. Sometimes it simply waits, patient, until you are weak enough to need it again. (Neo, 2026)