Phil Hoad

Set in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, Nick Cheung’s film follows a loose-cannon psychiatrist through a city deranged by stock-market storms

An immolated teenager flailing in a run down tenement. A doubledecker bus suspended above a calm sea bay. A dishevelled middle-aged couple frolicking down a high street, caught in their own private musical. There’s an irrepressible fountain of dream imagery erupting out of Nick Cheung’s fourth feature, which imagines Hong Kong after the 2008 financial crash as a nightmarish inland empire awash in outrage, anguish and guilt. “Other people’s money!” crows one investor – but the real business here is other people’s dreams.

After a car accident kills her husband, Harper and her daughter kidnap the driver responsible to serve their own kind of justice – but he may not be everything he first seems

Quoting the classics can be a dangerous game for a film – one liable to highlight your shortcomings. When two Gypsies-cum-demons chant Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, Robert Mitchum’s ditty from Night of the Hunter, not to mention bearing love-hate tattoos on their knuckles, it indicates that this low-budget British home-invasion horror is missing the same fairytale concision. Which is a shame, as this messy but entrancing, faintly surrealist feature by Shani Grewal has entirely different qualities of its own.