Film Brain reviews this deeply emotional Hong Kong crime drama, based on true events, that asks how do you forgive your kin when they take the rest of your family?
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00:00A father has to face the unimaginable in the Hong Kong true crime drama, Papa.
00:05Sean Lau is a restaurant owner whose world is shattered when his teenage son murders his wife and daughter.
00:11As he reels from the shock of his loss, Lau tries to connect with his son and try to find a way forward.
00:17The film was inspired by the Hung Wo Street murder in 2010, and despite the crime's notoriety,
00:22Where the Wind Blows director Philip Young treats it with a great amount of sensitivity,
00:27preferring to focus largely on the aftermath than sensationalise the incident itself.
00:32The film has a purposefully fragmented structure, intercutting the flashbacks before the murders,
00:36each focusing on a member of the family and meant to evoke the feeling of memory.
00:41Lau buys himself a digital camera to take photos of his family, reinforcing this idea,
00:45but also that these frozen happy memories miss the complexities underneath.
00:50The scenes in the past are vibrant and busy compared to the muted ones in the present,
00:54giving you a sense of how Lau's successful life has been destroyed in one senseless moment.
00:59Sean Lau gives a fantastic performance in the lead role, which is as understated as a loss of the film is.
01:06Lau has this deep well of sadness in his face, and at times is a barely functional shell of a man,
01:11and it's quietly heartbreaking as he tries to navigate everything that comes after
01:15in a world that recognises him constantly for the worst day of his life.
01:19There's only a few moments where his grief rises to the surface,
01:22like when he gets scammed by an escort or a karaoke scene, which makes them incredibly powerful.
01:28Lau's everyman makes us ask how we would react in his situation,
01:32and how would we find the strength to keep going through the darkness.
01:36Especially challenging for Lau is the meetings with his son, who is diagnosed with schizophrenia
01:41in an attempt to bridge the distance between them.
01:43While Lau at times got frustrated raising his son,
01:46who quietly struggled with his mental health before the crime,
01:49as a father he refuses to give up on him.
01:52Lau spends a lot of the film searching for a reason why his son did it,
01:56but accepting that it's an irrational act of illness is the only way they can both try to heal.
02:02This is a deeply empathetic film that slowly and thoughtfully examines what tragedy does
02:07to the ones who survive, without becoming exploitative or maudlin,
02:11and for those that have the patience, this will linger in your mind for days afterward.