Film Review: Peg O' My Heart 贖夢 (2025) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★★★★
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When Nightmares Demand Payment - Director Nick Cheung Ka-fai's “Peg O' My Heart” (贖夢 – "Dream Redemption") isn't merely a film; it's a fever dream deposited directly onto celluloid, a psycho-noir voyage into the debt-collecting recesses of a guilty subconscious. Cheung's fourth directorial outing, confirms his blossoming mastery of atmosphere and visual poetry, even as his grasp on narrative coherence occasionally slips through his fingers like the houseflies his protagonist vomits. This is a film that earns its rating not through tidy storytelling, but through sheer, unsettling, unforgettable bravura.
The plot, such as it is, orbits two broken men orbiting a shared abyss of trauma. Choi San-keung (Cheung, delivering a performance etched in exhaustion and terror) is an insomniac taxi driver whose mind is a collapsing mine shaft. His narcoleptic visions – a spectral double-decker bus hovering over an indifferent sea, colossal porcelain dolls drowning in viscous blood – are not cheap jump scares, but the horrifying currency his psyche uses to pay for past sins. Across this fractured Hong Kong landscape strides Dr. Man (Terrance Lau, admirably grounded), a junior psychiatrist whose attempts to heal Choi spiral into dangerously unorthodox methods, cracking open the vault of his own childhood horrors. Their collision course is less a detective story, more a mutual excavation conducted with psychic shovels.
Where “Peg O' My Heart” soars is in its breathtaking, often terrifying, sensory assault. Cheung, clearly a worthy disciple of Johnnie To's meticulous visual grammar, crafts a Hong Kong that feels dipped in Lynchian brine. Cinematography (Veteran Jason Kwan) melts light into a "blinding miasma," transitions blurring reality and nightmare with seamless, disorienting grace. The sound design is a character itself – waxy, oppressive, echoing the muffled terror of a suffocating dream. This is atmosphere thick enough to choke on, punctuated by moments of visceral horror (flies erupting from a mouth, anyone?) and haunting grace notes, like the melancholic sting of the titular 1913 standard underscoring a doomed romance. It stands defiantly apart from the usual Hong Kong fare – effectively scary, deeply strange.
The performances navigate this surreal terrain with remarkable commitment. Nick Cheung is extraordinary, playing not only the shattered Choi but also his doppelgänger, a sleekly successful stockbroker, with chilling conviction. You see the same soul fractured across two lives. Terrance Lau anchors Dr. Man with palpable desperation, though the script occasionally leaves him treading water in the murkier second act. Fala Chen, as Choi's wife Fiona, provides a terrifying counterpoint, her descent into madness a "no joke" display of escalating fragility and rage.
Crucially, the film finds its emotional ballast in the supporting cast. Rebecca Zhu, as Dr. Man's nurse Donna, offers a subtle, protective presence – a necessary island of quiet concern. Ben Yuen, as Man's abusive street hawker father, is a brutal, essential anchor for the psychiatrist's flashbacks. Natalie Hsu makes a striking impression in her brief, nightmarish sequence as the pregnant Yi, while Julius Brian Siswojo gives tragic weight to Choi's catalyst, the childhood friend lost to the 2008 financial crash.
Yes, the narrative can feel jagged. It also rightly point to "clumsy storytelling" and an ending that lands with a disconcerting thud rather than a satisfying click. And then there's the spectral elephant in the room: Andy Lau's high-profile cameo as the dream-walking psychiatrist Dr. Vincent Ching. It feels like pure "sequel-bait," a dazzling but distracting bauble thrown into the film's intricate, self-contained nightmare machine. It adds little to *this* story, hinting at a larger supernatural universe that momentarily breaks the spell.
Yet, these flaws feel almost secondary to the film's overwhelming ambition and achievement. “Peg O' My Heart” is a sincere, often staggering attempt to map the wild, irrational realms of the unconscious mind. It’s a film less concerned with explaining the nightmare than forcing you to feel it – the guilt, the terror, the suffocating weight of memories demanding payment. It doesn't always know precisely where it's going, but the journey it takes you on, through its blinding miasma and drowning dolls, is one of the most visually audacious and psychologically potent experiences Hong Kong cinema has offered in recent memory. It earns its redemption not through narrative perfection, but through its raw, terrifying, beautiful dream logic. Sometimes, salvation looks like sinking. (Neo, 2026)
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