Unidentified Murder is the kind of pure, unapologetic comedy that has largely been missing from Hong Kong cinema in the post-2019 era. Made on a modest budget of just HK$3 million (£280,400) and shot across only two primary locations, the film marks the feature debut of co-directors Kwok Ka-hei and Jack Lee Chun-kit. Yet these constraints do not compromise its quality. The film picked up Best Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, received three nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards and took home the White Mulberry Award at the Far East Film Festival.
Its plot is absolute chaos. It begins with an urban legend surrounding an alien abduction: a young boy vanishes on a hillside after visiting it with two friends, who claim to have seen a strange beam of light in the sky. Twenty-five years later, the girlfriend of one of the boys, now an online influencer (Renci Yeung), pranks her boyfriend (Ling Man-lung) and his friend (Ronald Lam) by hiring an eccentric actor (Peter Chan) to impersonate their long-lost childhood friend. The prank quickly spirals out of control into a murder, blackmail, an alien encounter, an explosion, and ultimately, a revelation of what really happened twenty-five years ago.
This is the kind of film for which spoilers must be avoided. The story initially unfolds from the influencer’s perspective, before revisiting the same scene through her boyfriend’s eyes. This structure repeats itself for each character through multiple flashbacks, with each version challenging and complementing the others. The layered framing creates a daisy-chain of distorted memories, continually revealing another absurd puzzle piece that reshapes what the audience thinks they know. . This intricate, non-linear design-still keeps the story unpredictable.
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In recent years, Hong Kong cinema has often turned towards weightier socio-political subjects: In Broad Daylight (2023) explores investigative journalism and institutional abuse in a care home; The Way We Talk (2025) addresses the experiences of deaf people and SEND education; and We’re Nothing at All (2026) confronts queer inequality and urban poverty. By contrast, the breezy, 86-minute Unidentified Murder does not deliver a profound social message. There is no obvious political critique or simmering anger beneath the surface, and some viewers may find it lacking in thematic depth. Yet this is also the film’s greatest strength. It simply wants to entertain, and it succeeds effortlessly.
The meticulously constructed screenplay is wonderfully grotesque, bringing both surprise and laughter by pushing every situation to increasingly absurd extremes. The performances are equally crucial, with Peter Chan emerging as a particular stand out.
His character, the actor Ah Kam, appears in all versions of the story and becomes a crucial thread connecting them. Yet Ah Kam himself has no idea what kind of chaos he has been dragged into. Constantly bewildered, he is forced to improvise his way of acting through one unexpected disaster after another. At the same time, he is an eccentric figure who is stubbornly committed to his craft to the point that no one around him can deal with him. Chan captures the absurdity of the character without pushing the comedy too far. Ah Kam’s earnest determination to be a “serious actor”, even as he becomes increasingly bewildered by the situation around him, makes him all the funnier.
Importantly, neither Chan nor the rest of the cast resorts to excessive overacting. It is an easy trap for a film with such an outrageous premise to fall into, turning its comedy to cheap farce. The great execution of the screenplay and performance of the actors make Unidentified Murder like the Japanese hit One Cut of the Dead and South Korea’s Save the Green Planet! – the kind of East Asian comedies that initially appear chaotic and bizarre, combining crime, science fiction, melodrama and comedy, before gradually making sense at the end.
This style of comedy has been well developed in Japan and South Korea, but it remains relatively rare in Hong Kong cinema. Crucially, Unidentified Murder gives the genre a distinctly local flavour rather than being a copycat. For example, the three childhood friends grew up in a familiar Hong Kong housing estate during the 1980s and 1990s, when local urban legends about aliens were popular. The film repeatedly returns to a cha chaan teng – one of the most recognisable symbols of everyday Hong Kong culture – whenever another piece of the puzzle is revealed.
These warm and intimate cultural references sit naturally alongside the film’s central theme: friendship. Beneath the outrageous plot is a story that begins with three innocent childhood friends and continues through a series of characters who prank, double-cross, and ultimately bail one another out of danger. This theme is also reflected in the film’s own production. Co-directors Kwok Ka-hei and Jack Lee Chun-kit first met their producer at secondary school over twenty years ago; two decades later, that same producer backed his schoolmates’ directorial debut by putting up his own savings to fund the shoot.
Unidentified Murder is neither the most technically elaborate nor the most thought-provoking Hong Kong film, but it is one of the freshest and boldest. It is proof that a good film is not defined by the size of its budget or the fame of its cast,and that local comedy does not always need to recycle the mo lei tau traditions of Stephen Chow. At a time when Hong Kong cinema is often characterised by gloom and heavy social realism,Unidentified Murder provides an alternative that feels just as vital: pure, unadulterated escapism.
In UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 11th September 2026
