Film Review: Under Current 內幕 (2025) - Hong Kong / China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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A Sleek, Smoldering Thriller of Wallets and Wills - Director Alan Mak returns to the gray-zone battlegrounds he knows so well with “Under Current”, a film that operates like a precision-engineered watch—cold, intricate, and compelling in its relentless forward motion. This isn’t the bullet-riddled, heroic bloodshed of old Hong Kong cinema, but a more modern, chilling corrosion. The weapons here are subpoenas, shell companies, and the quiet, devastating power of a well-placed lie. It earns its mark not through explosions, but through the slow, satisfying burn of minds at war.
The film’s engine is its superb, grizzled duality. Aaron Kwok plays a lawyer so sharp he seems to cut the light in the room, a man who navigates legal loopholes with the calm precision of a surgeon. Opposite him, Francis Ng embodies a detective whose weariness is a kind of wisdom, his determination fueled not by flashy ambition but by a profound, professional disgust for the filth he must wade through. Their chemistry, reignited after 25 years, is the film’s core pleasure. This is a cat-and-mouse game where the cat is armed with case law and the mouse carries a detective’s shield. Their confrontations across interrogation tables and sterile boardrooms crackle with a tension that action sequences could only cheapen.
The plot is ruthlessly contemporary: a money-laundering operation embedded like a parasite within a charitable foundation. Mak and his screenwriters perform the vital alchemy of making spreadsheets and wire transfers feel as dangerous as a gunfight. They are aided immeasurably by a haunting, pivotal turn from Simon Yam, whose early scenes drape the entire narrative in a shroud of grim consequence. He reminds us that in this world, the ultimate cost is not measured in dollars, but in souls.
Visually, the film presents a Hong Kong of steel, glass, and rain-slicked midnight streets—a metropolis that reflects not light, but ambition. The cinematography is sleek and unromantic, a perfect mirror for the moral ambiguities within. At 115 minutes, the film moves with purpose, though it must be said that the machinery of the complex plot requires a second act heavily reliant on dialogue-driven exposition. Those seeking relentless kinetic thrills may grow restless. This is a thriller for the mind, one that asks you to follow the money and the motive.
“Under Current” does not seek to shatter the genre like Mak’s co-directed masterpiece, “Infernal Affairs”. It has a more modest, but no less admirable, goal: to be a superlative example of it. It is a procedural that understands procedure is only as interesting as the people executing it. In the end, it succeeds because it values the crease of frustration on Francis Ng’s brow, the calculating gleam in Aaron Kwok’s eye, and the chilling void in a ledger’s bottom line over any cheap spectacle. It is a smart, adult, and thoroughly engrossing piece of craftsmanship—a reminder that the most dangerous currents are the ones you never see. (Neo, 2026)