Online Review: That Demon Within魔警 – The “Other Side” of Human

I believed that every Hong Kong citizens had been impressed on the bank robbery and murder that committed by Tsui Po-ko in 2006 till now. This movie which is showed in April 2014, was not just focusing on the crime that committed by Tsui, but also giving a fiction story about the process of Tsui becoming a murderer from a normal, in order to bring the story of some Hong Kong local values and traditional cultures like traditional funerary services, and the foul language in Hong Kong style.

This movie actually brings out the conflicts of Hong Kong identities. From 1841 to 1997, Hong Kong as a Crown Colony belonged to British. In 1997 the Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong actually made panic in Hong Kong citizen’s mind, because the identities of Hong Kong citizens have been blurred, till nowadays. Would Hong Kong still have the unique identity different to Chinese, or we have been influenced by Chinese government secretly and imperceptibly. The movie used many emotional scene of the leading character, Wong which is acted by Daniel Wu to show the conflict created by the pressure made by the identity confusion. The memory that Wong remembers the most in his childhood is the moment when his father got killed in an accident, and the Royal Hong Kong Police which acted by Niki Cheung Ka Fai, afterwards adopted Wong but then Wong set on fire in order to killed that police to revenge on his father’s death. When he grows up, he ironically became a Royal Hong Kong police also. Once he donated blood to the criminal who looks like the police that he killed in his childhood, he seems to have hallucination and cannot recognize what is real and what is hallucination.

According to the national allegory, this fiction story just as a mean of expressing a dimension of existence rather than only characters. In order to show the conflict that nowadays Hong Kong society is facing that is the disorder of the society and the conflicts of our self-identities. The director of this film also using many distort scenes to represent the kind of invisible violence and pressure fighting against the power in order to resist from the regime. Therefore it is very common to see the violence behaviors always an eye for an eye. Also the situation of nervous breakdown of Wong in this movie represent he cannot face up to the identities change just like nowadays Hong Kong, there are still many controversy on the identity of Hong Kong people and too many conflicts between Chinese and Hong Kong people, like Occupy Central with Love and Peace happened in 2014. This movie is not merely an action movie or telling a suspense story to terrify audiences, but there is something more considerable deep inside this movie that the director want us to notice and showing us how the director thinking about the Hong Kong society and the change of the identity of Hong Kong citizens.


Student Name: Chow Man Shan
Student ID: 21426593

(500 words)