Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In, Soi Cheang’s new nightmare
Less than a year after the release of Limbo, a black and white thriller in the form of a labyrinthe nightmare, the Hong Kong filmmaker Soi Cheang is here for a Midnight Screening to make film lovers shudder with Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In, the film adaptation of City of Darkness, the series of cult manhua by Andy Seto.
Soi Cheang had left us stunned in the stylised Hell of a soaked Hong Kong, in the steps of a veteran cop in a dark raincoat and his young superior, both embroiled in the pursuit a killer of women who cuts off his victims’ hands.
Nothing unusual, though, when you know the appetite of the Hong Kong director for stories that are strongly haunted and violent, who examines the savagery of the world as one observes a gaping wound, as in Love Battlefield (2004) and Dog Bite Dog (2006), two feature films that definitively put the director in the category of those who don’t beat about the bush.
Set in the 1980s, Twilight of the Warriors : Walled In follows the survivalist journey of Chan Lok-kwun, a young Chinese-Vietnamese man who accidentally enters the Kowloon Walled City, an old Chinese enclave in colonial British Hong Kong controlled by Tornado, a legendary underworld figure both feared and revered by the inhabitants.
In this city, as dangerous and impoverished as it is enigmatic, the able clandestine fighter will strike up a friendship with Shin, Twelfth Master and AV, a trio with whom he will carry out a series of ferocious battles to protect the city from Mr. Big, a crime lord hired by the colonial government to destroy it.
“I warn you. Don’t cause any problems. Troublemakers die,”», as one of the characters says in one of the excerpts that have been released, a cigarette in his hand, surrounded by a horde of fighters. We are also warned: Soi Cheang is back with a film – in part choreographed – which borrows its codes from classic martial arts films. And his return promises to be bloody.
