If you’ve sat through Delicatessen and Parents, you’ll know that in movies, trying the mystery meat is rarely a good idea. Even armed with this knowledge, the ingredients for Bai Ling’s eponymous dumpling recipe will make your hair stand on end.
Fruit Chan’s Dunplings, alternately a shocking grand guignol and a blistering satire, makes merry with the lot of the married woman. Miriam Yeung stars as a fading Hong Kong soap opera actress who, in desperation, visits mainlander Bai Ling, a witchy backstreet abortionist offering a treatment to restore youthful beauty and the attentions of straying husbands. Long before you figure out the secret ingredient, Chris Doyle’s claustrophobic camera work and Kwong Wing-chan’s disquieting score will have freaked you out. Then things get really unsettling.
Lillian Lee’s smart, stinging screenplay takes aim at a multitude of contemporary targets. Those who doubt that the modern obsession with anti-ageing potions could lead to such sinister places should check out the waiting list for Crème De La Mer in Brown Thomas. And those who doubt that marriage is, more often than not, legalised domestic servitude for women, should check out the divorce courts.
Blood-curdling and provocative, Dumplings may be the best Asian body horror since Audition. And I’ve spent five years getting over that.