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Brother of Darkness (1994)

Dir: Billy Tang

“Brother of Darkness” opens with the bloodied corpse of Wong Koon Wah (William Ho Kar Kui) lying on the floor and his killer, Wong Kuen To (Hugo Ng) being arrested and, via flashbacks during the subsequent Court trial, proceeds to uncover the events that led to such a grisly outcome.

To is the much younger adopted Brother of Wah, who is a brutal, heartless and basically unhinged sadist.
To's adopted Parents live in terror of their thuggish Son and dread the times when he comes home (normally after a spell in prison).
Wah’s reign of evil includes violently abusing To, forcing his Wife into acts of sexual depravity in front of his cowed Family's very eyes and taking money whenever he sees fit from his struggling Parents.

As To grows up he learns Martial Arts to try and defend himself and the Family from Wah, but the mental and physical scars remain.
Love enters Wong Kuen To’s life in the form of Jenny (Lily Chung Suk Wai, “Red to Kill“), but he is unable to fully make love to her because of an injury sustained during one of Wah’s attacks on him as a child.

To add to this misery To still finds that Wah casts a shadow over his life and rules the Family with as much terror as he ever did, including his own young Son, who is also victim of his sadism.
And as the legacy of abuse seeps into To’s relationship with Jenny the table is set for a devastating final confrontation….

 

Writer Kong Heung Sang based “Brother of Darkness” on a supposed true case, and has delivered a thankfully serious (for the most part) study of inter-Family abuse and it’s consequences.

Although there is no direct comedy here, the initial scene of Wah roughly having sex with his disinterested Wife is marred by some (I assume) unintentional moments of humour in the way Wah acts and some of the things he says (not helped, once again, by some rather tragic translations in the English subtitles), thankfully though this is countered by the genuinely hard hitting sequence later when the young To is beaten and thrown out of a window.
And it is here, when To lands on the garbage pile below, that Tang (“Red To Kill”, “Daughter of Darkness”) delivers one of the movies most stunningly effective scenes. Holding on close-up of To’s face, as he lies in the rubbish, we literally see something die inside the young boy as he casually wipes the rain from his forehead and stares into the night with the coldest eyes.

The sex is as rough as you would expect from a CAT III film (and although still trimmed the recent ‘Universe’ DVD release is the most complete print seen so far), but it’s in the events that surround the sex that the film shocks. Tang truly pulls out all the stops for example when, after loudly screwing his Wife so the whole family can here, Wah literally throws his screaming Son into the bedroom (as his Mother hurries to cover her nakedness and porn plays on the TV) and coldly stubs out a cigarette on the child’s bare backside. It’s the kind of act involving a child character (and it has to be said, actor) that would never be accepted in the West and shows just how uncompromising Hong Kong Directors can be when they want to push the visual representation of abuse into an audience’s face. And, as brutal and even exploitative it may be, this actually represents a very honest approach to such heinous acts and their effect on the victims.

But away from the violent/rough sexual acts, Tang also delivers warm and romantic love scenes between Jenny and To that, although they make sure they show off just how beautiful a sight a naked Lilly Chung is, perfectly and tenderly portray the nervous anticipation of the two lovers and even Chung’s later (wonderfully staged) masturbation scene rises above of it’s obvious exploitation aspects because it’s a valid act of her character’s frustration, disappointment and confused emotional state.
The rare sight of male full frontal nudity (in this case Ng’s flacid penis) is also a valid and powerful image in the context it is used and is a rightfully upfront and honest image in a sequence of intense psychological pain for Ng’s character.

The film does sadly slip into farce at one point though when Anthony Wong’s Prosecutor (countering the explanation for To’s impotence on Wah‘s abuse) makes humorous digs at the female Defense Lawyer about how a woman’s ‘insensitivity’ could cause a moment of impotence in a man! That any Lawyer would do this is silly enough, but that she then makes reference back to him about knowing so much about being impotent (all in open Court!) just forces home the stupidity of this whole scene.
In fact the whole Courtroom set-up is the weakest, and least well made, part of the film and once again some shockingly bad subtitles only make matters worse.

The film looks as fantastic as always (Tang never fails to hire Cinematographers, here Tony Mau, that can make the most ugly sights look asthetically beautiful) with that lush use of steel blue and neon red colouring that is always so effective.

William Ho Kar Kui (“Escape from Brothel”, “The Story of Ricky”) turns in his usual brash psycho performance and is effective on a comic book level, but he’s too over the top for the most part to sustain real, serious intensity (it’s Wah’s acts of abuse that come across strong, more so than his actual character) and he’s certainly not as genuinely terrifying as Ben Ng was as the psycho in Tang’s “Red to Kill” of the same year. This pantomime level of villainy is even more obvious in fact when place alongside the deeply serious playing by Chung and Ng, who both bring genuine humanity and emotion to their characters. Ng especially endows his character with tragedy and pathos that never sinks into the trap of seeming forced and false.

The more graphic violence is saved for the finale (and sadly there’s, even in this partly restored version, a few obvious and sometimes confusing cuts) and it’s the kind of very personal, hand to hand, brutality that Tang handles so well. And although it is not nearly as nasty or intense (not helped by the censor trims) as the astonishingly extreme finale to “Red to Kill”, the well handled explosion of real violence in To is so well played by Ng that the sequence still remains pretty powerful.

Overall then, although the screenplay is rather repetitive as far as Wah’s constant abusive appearances and resulting arguments go and the pacing falters during middle passages, “Brother of Darkness” delivers enough intensity as the tragic events unfold to hold the attention and is boosted no end by the strong performances by Chung and Ng which help pull things together.
Not a classic CAT III movie, but one still well worth checking out.