By Keri O’Shea
Can it really be five years since Dream Home first graced our screens? Bloody hell. It seems incredible that one of the biggest hits of the festival circuit of the year of its release and a big success with many horror film fans has had to wait until now to make it out on Blu-ray. Well, ours not to question why (actually that’s bollocks – we’re always questioning why) and it’s here now, at least. It’s interesting, though: I haven’t revisited the film at all in the intervening years since I first saw it – meaning that, apart from anything else, fairly inevitably a few of the plot details had become lost to the mists of time – but I think seeing Dream Home outside of the festival experience at last has allowed me to look at it with a more sober eye. When I saw the film for the first time, I was blown away by the incredibly visceral gore, a raft of high production values and a genuinely unique rationale for the violence on offer – meaning it made one of my films of the year. Whilst all of those things are still there of course, it’s a lot clearer to me now that Dream Home is tonally rather odd. The film juggles pathos with overkill, commenting on very real social issues but doing it with a level of grue that’s sometimes arduous, and sometimes humorous. I’m not sure if ‘splatter satire’ was particularly a thing before Dream Home, but it certainly feels like it was the first to do anything quite like this.
Via a reasonably complex time frame which goes from minutes-and-seconds precision to time lapse and a back-story which encompasses many years, we meet our main character Sheung (Josie Ho), a young woman who may appear to be upwardly-mobile, but who struggles considerably to keep her head above water in Hong Kong’s brutal financial climate (which the film is very happy to make clear to foreign viewers, explaining the great disparity between average earnings and property prices). Working two jobs to help her save up for a deposit on a property, we’re gradually introduced to the reasons why she’s so hellbent on owning an apartment in one area of the city in particular; we see Sheung’s life as a rather bleak trudge through drudgery and anonymity, peopled by those who don’t care and largely don’t matter, and via flashback we see that it’s been this way for a significant share of her life so far. However, it’s some time before we’re permitted to fully join the dots, and see just why this young woman is on a murderous ascent through the apartment block she would like to call home.
Despite the great pains which director and writer Ho-Cheung Pang takes with the characterisation of Sheung, crafting a fairly complex contextualisation for her behaviour at the film’s most up-to-date point, she remains a challenging prospect, and I found this was more the case with today’s viewing than with the last, where I rather more happily accepted that there was method to her madness. Yes, she’s a young woman who has been pushed to the brink by circumstance, and Josie Ho does sterling work here in many respects, but there are aspects to Sheung that I find hard to get past, on reflection: perhaps that’s the point, and you’re meant to see her more as a symbol of the sort of blinkered materialism which drives people down certain incomprehensible paths (though perhaps not to this extreme!) than as some sort of beleaguered Everyman character who just can’t help it as a victim of circumstance, but as characters go she’s not easy to empathise with, all told. Step aside from the bad murders, even, and you’re still left with a lousy daughter (oh come on), a lacklustre mistress, someone who’s selfish, even squeamish, and to state the fucking obvious, deeply flawed. Still, maybe this is less about Sheung and more about everyone else: there are no likeable people in Ho-Cheung Pang’s modern vista of Hong Kong. Everyone we meet has some sort of agenda; everyone is out for themselves, either behaving connivingly, indolently or hopelessly, or accepting of all the above in spades. This is a very bleak film indeed.
Knowing all of that, though, perhaps makes it harder to accept the fact that the film takes some serious risks with its tone. In some places, especially when dealing with the young Sheung in her childhood, the plot feels almost saccharin: not all of the justification for her unshakeable adult stance on a sea-front view is convincing. Similarly, skip forward to the night of violence at the apartment block, and the film prevaricates, not sure whether it wants to plump for the more challenging, ‘torture porn’ style killings (hey, I don’t like the term either but you at least know what I mean by it) or a more grim, cartoonish type of splatter, with a few of the murders moving from the sublime well into the ridiculous, with one of the victims even sending himself up a bit. It can all feel a little schizophrenic, and maybe tried to do too much within one movie.
Still, it sounds for all the world like I really didn’t enjoy my second viewing of Dream Home…but I did, really, newly-found misgivings or otherwise. For all of her unlikeable traits, Sheung remains a compelling and original character throughout, and her own disbelief that she’s doing what she’s doing definitely adds an engaging note to the plot. It’s here that we closest approach caring for her. And although it’s not approached all in one way or another, either deadly serious or played for kicks, Dream Home does have a very real set of concerns at its core, with its particular telling of the long-term effects of slum clearance and rising city prices certainly making for a hard-hitting, innovative horror film. Sure, everything is blown up to grotesque proportions (that’s what monsters are for) but that fits in well with the film’s opening assertion that in a crazy city ‘one has to be crazier’. The film still looks incredible, too, with its colours and long shots really popping off the screen in the new, polished format. If you haven’t yet seen Dream Home, this is definitely the way to go.
We’ll say nothing of the fact that the distributors, in their wisdom, have included cover ratings from two defunct and let’s say, problematic print magazines (Nuts and Gorezone!) – in this case, this is still a worthy disc to add to the collection.
Dream Home is available via Network from 25th May 2015.