It’s raining heavily in the dark streets of Hong Kong flooded with garbage bags and rubbish. In this sordid decor that oozes dirt and humidity, no human trace, except for a thin severed left hand found in a dumpster. That of a woman… Welcome to Limbo, a gloomy thriller from director Soi Cheang, 52, a native of Macao, who designed it as a black and white labyrinth from which the heroes do not emerge unscathed. Consider two cops, a veteran (Gordon Lam) whose wife is dying in a hospital and his young superior (Mason Lee, the son of filmmaker Ang Lee, noticed in Very Bad Trip 2), whose particularity is to have a toothache. Together, they desperately search for a killer who preys on women. No trail leads to him in the city’s slums populated by drug addicts and homeless people.
Only a young delinquent junkie, Wong To (Cya Liu), who specializes in car thefts, can serve as bait. But you have to be able to catch it in the giant gutter of this sprawling city that Soi Cheang presents in its most ghostly, gloomy aspect.
This is the artistic bias of the director, who invokes pell-mell pain, guilt, revenge and putrefaction. Suffice to say that we navigate in a universe without god or redemption of souls. Violence is omnipresent and blows rain down everywhere. Especially on this poor Wong To, who concentrates on her all the rage of the men, in particular the veteran cop who, he thinks, has his reasons for pursuing and beating her. Beaten, often left for dead, but always ready to get up. We are often at the limit of the bearable, but, obviously, the director does not seem concerned with violence against women and justifies it as a necessary test to show the resilience of the character. Yeah.
Obviously, this radical bias, this aesthetic of the extreme has something to shake the spectator, lead him to the side of fascination or disgust. Here, the fiction turns to the rawest realism, the most cruel too.
In line with Johnnie To, John Woo or Takeshi Kitano, Soi Cheang tries to carve out a special place for himself in the world of thrillers by pushing the horror cursor ever further. With him, the characters, victims of their destiny, run in all directions, fight constantly, seem disoriented and hallucinated over the ordeals they go through.
In these rain-drenched slums of the city, the two cops will end up getting their hands on the potential killer, a Japanese illegal immigrant who kidnaps Wong To, held prisoner tied by ropes. There, we are close to the horror film as she seems to concentrate on her all the misery and violence of the world. Pushing once again the limits of the bearable, the scenario writer sees there rather not a Chinese torture, but a kind of exorcism, without complacency nor sadism. Her heroine takes on the starring role, so to speak, but at what cost? For his part, Cédric Jimenez (Bac Nord, Novembre, La French), who chaired the Reims Polar 2023 jury, gave Limbo the Grand Prix, stressing that it is “one of those films that reminds us of how cinema is something enjoyable, galvanizing”.
Limbo, in theaters July 12
