Tribeca kills for 'Dream Home'

By Sarah Sluis

Though I'm not a big horror fan, I've had some luck with Asian horror films, which tend to be more inventive both stylistically and in terms of plot. Such was the case with Tribeca Film Festival selection Dream Home, a Chinese horror film with a protagonist whose killings are motivated by the Hong Kong housing crisis.

I was expecting the movie to respond, in some way, to America's own housing crisis, but that's like fitting a square peg into a round hole. Josie Ho plays a woman who desperately wants to buy her own flat. In the Hong Kong housing market apartments go for $3,000 a square foot (with 30% down!), making even tiny apartments worth millions of dollars. She resorts to killing the tenants of an apartment in an effort to make it vacant. As expected, the plot is inventive, moving back and forth between her one-night killing spree and various points in her life before that, from her childhood to just a few weeks before. However, it was hard for me to see how someone could resort to killing just for an apartment. In America, there was the opposite problem, with tons of housing stock encouraging unqualified buyers to get in too deep. What the two places have in common is the desperation with which people pursue the dream of having a place of one's own, even when it goes against all logical reasoning.

In the Q&A afterward, one horror fan commended director Pang Ho-Cheung for his original death scenes. Ho-Cheung said he came up with the killing ideas by "going around my apartment and looking at how things could be used differently." Indeed, the deaths are very original, both in the type of implements used to cause them and the pacing of the deaths. People wriggle around in their death throes for ages, pinned down or trapped or strangled but still holding on for life (this is the kind of thing that makes horror fans laugh and everyone else squirm and cover their eyes). Vacuum storage bags, coffee tables, and bed slats are all used as weapons, and, believe me, the deaths are not immediate. Ho-Cheung's horror film is also light on suspense. He uses it sparingly, usually in the approach before the attack. Without suspense, the audience is more relaxed. Those that like watching people killed (and that includes the director: "We just started killing

and it was so happy we just kept on doing") got their fair share of original death scenes.

Ho-Cheung also revealed that the role was originally written for a man, but actress Josie Ho expressed interest in a role where she could kill people and took on the part. He maintains that they changed nothing in the script to adapt it to her, a statement that rings mostly true (the dynamic with her married boyfriend seems like it must have been changed a bit). In the killing scenes, this works quite well. Her creative methods of killing seem better motivated, and when she is occasionally being outmatched in strength and being choked, it's very believable. At the same time, her character is an incredibly strong and determined personality, with no discernable weakness.

A final thought: the movie hinges on the weeks before October 31, 2007, the moment when Hong Kong's stock market was at its ultimate high before coming crashing down. Hong Kong audiences know this date, so it's helpful to place the moment in your mind as equivalent to right before all the banks and housing markets crashed in the U.S. As for the movie itself? Horror fans will come away more than fulfilled, but those like me, who only like the genre at its best-of-the-best moments (Audition, Uzumaki, Old Boy), won't have a new favorite to add to their list.