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How Hong Kong director Ringo Lam freshened up the crime genre with Victim and Triangle
Ringo Lam infused 1999’s Victim with notes of The Exorcist, and teamed up with Tsui Hark and Johnnie To for 2007’s ‘chaotic mess’ Triangle
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Ringo Lam Ling-tung, who died in 2018, was best known for his early films like the trendsetting City on Fire.
But the Hong Kong director, who would not compromise his vision in the face of commercial concerns, delivered high-quality work throughout his career.
Here we look at two of Lam’s lesser-seen mid-period works.
1. Victim (1999)
Victim was an attempt by Lam to inject his crime thrillers with a new dimension: the supernatural.
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This was not a completely new genre for Lam; his 1983 movie debut Esprit D’amour was a romantic ghost story. But since the success of 1987’s City on Fire, he had concentrated mainly on gritty crime stories.
The film, which stars Lau Ching-wan, Tony Leung Ka-fai and Lau’s real-life partner Amy Kwok Oi-ming, still unspools like a standard cops-and-robbers story. But Lam buries some spooky elements in the narrative to make the viewer think there may be aspects of demonic possession at work.
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“I’d been thinking about moving away from pure crime for some time,” Lam told critic Derek Elley in 1999, noting that he was a fan of horror classics like The Exorcist and The Omen.
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