Home may not be such a safe haven in Nate Ki’s debut horror.
“It’s dark, come home.”
One of my favourite aspects of horror stories is how they can use their fantastical nature to tell a story of real life horrors. For example, The Babadook, on top of being a queer icon, is a study on grief, and Under the Shadow is an exploration woman- and motherhood in Iran. Ghosts are especially true of this, representing anything from regrets to trauma to anxiety of the future. That said, sometimes ghosts are ghosts, and at the start of any ghost story you never quite know which it’s going to be.
Watching Back Home, the directorial debut of Nate Ki, I couldn’t help but wonder which it was going to be. Anson Kong stars as Lai Heung Wing, a young man with the ability to see ghosts. He’s spent the past decade in Canada, ignoring his childhood and forgetting about his ability, but when a call from Hong Kong informs him his mother has attempted suicide and is in a coma, he returns to his childhood home, and his gifts, as well as his memories, come flooding back.
Back Home is something of a mixed bag in terms of content. For the most part, it does seemingly play exactly like your generic, run-of-the-mill ghost story. There are jump scares, slow-burn reveals and all the usual tropes you’ve come to expect from the genre, all wrapped around a so-so mystery about people of the building killing themselves. It’s perfectly fine, and not particularly frightening.
Early on, you get a sense that there isn’t much consistency to the ghosts. It seems to be scary imagery for the sake of it, and it’s not all good at achieving that either. There’s the black shadow, the spooky kids, the screaming person and everything else under the sun. It’s nothing particularly new, though I appreciate the way it tries to tie the flashes of horror imagery with a particular memory, and the torturous childhood that Heung Wing suffered due to his gift. The torture, it’s worth adding, that was almost entirely done by the living, breathing people he interacted with and not the ghosts.
On top of that, the production design is great. The apartment building does a lot of the heavy lifting during most of the movie. Sometimes it’s shot like the grimiest places ever put on film and other times it looks perfectly nice with some of the apartments inside looking very habitable. The change in styles to suit the scene lends an eerie atmosphere to a film that often struggles to chill. There are scenes where nothing happens, but the silent dread do more than any ghostly imagery did. The setting also does a good job of reminding you of the truly excellent Dark Water, but while that movie had a sense of what the ghosts were all about, this one doesn’t. At least not at first.
The idea that there’s something wrong with the estate isn’t introduced for a while, which is a shame as it’s what really grounds the movie. Then the idea that the ghosts and deaths are linked is introduced, and the film starts to take shape but it’s not until way past the halfway mark and a few people will have definitely checked out by then.
While its horror production values are decent enough, with plenty of atmosphere, gloomy lighting, camerawork and music there’s never a real sense of danger. The only thing that threatens the main character, and the boy he befriends, is that they might slowly go mad from constantly being bothered by these apparitions. It’s less about fear and more about frustration a lot of the time. Sometimes the frightening scenes end up feeling exactly like a man trying to sleep and his pet cat waking him up for no reason.
Things to start to come together at the end, and the film’s ideas and satirical edges become far clearer. Watching this film with the lens of Hong Kong’s treatment the mentally ill, and its ignorance of many everyday societal troubles (the idea of someone cutting their tongues suddenly takes on a new, far more interesting meaning when this interpretation comes to mind). It’s a shame that it doesn’t really dig into those themes until it might be too late. Watch it with that in mind – or wait until it becomes obvious within the context – and suddenly the film takes on a brand new energy, one it was lacking at the start. It certainly might start a bit rocky, but Nate Ki certainly is able to bring it, well, Back Home.
Verdict: Not particularly frightening, Back Home nonetheless boasts some decent commentary, excellent atmosphere and an excellent choice in leads.
Overall entertainment: 6.5/10
Violence: 3/10
Sex: 1/10
Trope counter: We even get the kid drawing scary things
Hong Kong housing satire: “With sky high prices, even haunted homes seem attractive”
Those backwards dates: Did I miss something? What was that all about
Charcoal burning suicide: It’s a carbon monoxide thing, by the way
Back Home (2023)
Cantonese
Director: Nate Ki
Writer: Nate Ki
CAST
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Anson Kong – Lai Heung Wing
Bai Ling – Tang Wai-lan
Wesley Won – Yu
Wing-Sze Ng – Social Worker
Shirley Sham – Yu’s Mother
Tai-Bo – Mr Chung
Yuk Ying Tam – Mrs Chung
Sean Wong – Young Heung Wing
The Asian Cinema Critic 