At The Movies: Papa tells a heart-rending story, In The Lost Lands strictly for Resident Evil fans

Papa (M18)

129 minutes, opens on March 6
★★★★☆

The story: In 2010 Hong Kong, 17-year-old Ming (Dylan So) hacks to death his mother (Jo Koo) and younger sister (Lainey Hung) with a cleaver. He is diagnosed with schizophrenia upon arrest and remanded indefinitely. Lau Ching Wan plays the bereaved patriarch in the crime tragedy based on the Heung Wo Street double murder.

The audience first encounters Lau’s middle-aged working-class Nin at the 24-hour cha chaan teng he runs, going about his day in his Tsuen Wan neighbourhood – going through the motions, really, this shell of a man.

Papa is a portrait of a father’s unfathomable grief in the aftermath of the carnage.

Memories of his happy home flood his consciousness. His loving relationships with introverted Ming, his beautiful wife, their sweet daughter and her adopted cat each occupies a chapter in the impressionistic non-linear narrative, the cast – yes, the cat too – uniformly outstanding.

How is he to piece back these fragments and restart his life? Unable to forget the dead or hate the living, he visits Ming twice a month at the psychiatric prison to seek answers to that fateful night.

Lau’s quiet torment of sorrow, loneliness, survivor’s guilt and anger won him a record fifth Best Actor award at the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, where Philip Yung (Port Of Call, 2015) was named Best Director for a delicate, matter-of-fact drama shorn of false sentiments.

The 4:3 screen ratio boxes Nin in his emotions. His only hope, that which sustains him, is for Ming’s return someday, because his son is all he has left.

Hot take: Lau is shattering, heading an excellent ensemble in a wrenching story of a family destroyed by a violent act.

In The Lost Lands (NC16)

101 minutes, opens on March 6
★★☆☆☆

The story: Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista team up as, respectively, a sorceress and her guide into the Lost Lands on a quest for a mythical werewolf.

In a better movie, the fierce rebel maiden was called Furiosa, and her male companion, Mad Max.

In The Lost Lands is a dystopian western fantasy by American writer-director-producer Paul W.S. Anderson and it is murky malarkey, not George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), despite its post-apocalyptic setting of a desolate outpost with a sickly overlord (Jacek Dzisiewicz) like the Citadel warlord (Hugh Keays-Byrne).

The treacherous queen (Amara Okereke) is the villain. It is she who sends Jovovich’s condemned witch Gray Alys into the ghostly wasteland beyond the city walls to find her the magic of shape-shifting so that she can seize the throne.

Anderson and his missus-muse Jovovich are the Hollywood couple behind Monster Hunter (2020) and the Resident Evil (2002 to 2016) franchise. This loose adaptation of a 1982 George R.R. Martin short story is less Game Of Thrones (2011 to 2019) than another of the film-maker’s live-action video games as Jovovich and Bautista’s gunslinging drifter slay demons, a two-headed snake and nameless otherworldly creatures against a backdrop of ugly desaturated digital effects.

They have six days until the full moon to accomplish their task. Would Martin be good enough to explain why?

It is admittedly encouraging to see a 49-year-old into her third decade as a hardcore action heroine: Jovovich’s breakthrough was in The Fifth Element in 1997. Bautista, whatever his star appeal, is second fiddle, and the actress remains a commanding presence amid an incomprehensible plot everyone seems to take very seriously.

Hot take: Strictly for Resident Evil devotees, and even then.