According to the South China Morning Post, Anselm Chan’s melodrama The Last Dance is the highest grossing Hong Kong film in history, at least domestically; which is amazing given the film’s setting and subject matter. Cantonese standup comic Dayo Wong plays Dominic Ngai, a doggedly entrepreneurial wedding planner whose business is derailed by the COVID pandemic, sending him into a pit of debt he can’t crawl out of. His girlfriend’s Uncle Ming (Paul Chun), who’s planning to retire, offers Dominic half of the funeral parlor he manages with a Taoist priest, Master Man (Michael Hui), thinking that Dominic wouldn’t have to learn anything new. “There’s not much difference between newlyweds and the newly dead,” he quips with the nonchalance of someone whose familiarity with death has become casual. Dominic, as much of a go-getter capitalist as you can be in Hong Kong right now, relishes the challenge, but Master Man proves to be an obstacle, a stone traditionalist who looks upon Dominic’s new ideas for drumming up business as tantamount to blasphemy, since he sees the mission of a funeral as that of helping the dead, through ritual, pass on to the next stage of their cosmic journey while Dominic sees it as tending to the survivors. 

The resultant clash of sensibilities is instructive, and not just for those who want to learn about Chinese cultural norms. Man’s bullheaded approach to his profession isn’t just about preserving tradition, in which Chan repeatedly pokes holes. Compromising Taoist dogma would be a betrayal of his responsibility to his dead wife, a faith that curdles into stubbornness as far as his children are concerned. Daughter Yuet (Michelle Wai), who once aspired to take over the family business but is denied the opportunity because Taoism forbids women into its realm due to menstrual “impurity,” has taken the opposite path by becoming a paramedic to whom every death is personal. Son Ben (Tommy Chu), who Man insists will inherit his priestly robes, doesn’t want the job and secretly gets baptized, not because he has a Christian jones but because his wife wants their son to get into a fancy Catholic school. With this kind of resistance at home, Man takes his frustrations out on Dominic. “You don’t take the dead seriously,” he fumes when his new partner cooks up a marketing strategy to drum up business. But the younger man comes around to the ethical dimensions of his job, albeit in a way that Man can’t countenance. At one point a woman whose patronage has been refused by every funeral parlor in town begs Dominic to embalm her dead son, with whom she can’t part. It’s an affront to standard religious practices, but Dominic agrees and even performs the disagreeable task himself, much to Man’s initial disgust. 

One of the movie’s strongest suits is the way it doesn’t flinch from Dominic’s more difficult tasks—the cleaning and dressing of the corpses, the application of makeup to damaged features, not to mention the jokey mood engendered by those whose everyday work is attending to the departed (which the contractors refer to as “fish”). And while the main character arc is Man’s slow realization, as his own end comes into view, that his intransigence about his calling and how it affects his family is indefensible, Dominic’s journey is more affecting. When his girlfriend Jade (Catherine Chow) announces she is pregnant, he sensibly but compassionately says that at his age—he’s just turned 50—he cannot rightly accept bringing a new life into the world, since he may not be there when the child needs him the most. Though The Last Dance has been called a comedy, it doesn’t generate a lot of laughs, but it’s a banquet of food for thought.

They Will Kill You, which also deals with rituals of death, is a real comedy, though after a while the joke is stretched very thin. Zazie Beetz gets her John Wick on as Asia Reaves, who throughout the film is set upon by hordes of rich Satan-worshippers who can regenerate endlessly from horrific wounds, thus making Asia’s superior fighting skills, which she learned during a ten-year stint in the slammer, almost moot. 

Reaves takes a position as a maid at an exclusive Manhattan apartment building called the Virgil that’s like a Mad Magazine version of the Dakota in Rosemary’s Baby. Her mission is to find the younger sister, Maria (Myah’la), she hasn’t seen since she went up the river for shooting their abusive father and who she has heard is now employed at the Virgil. After a proper introduction and explanation by the building manager, Lilith (Patricia Arquette), Asia quickly finds out that she is the latest hire to be sacrificed to the Devil and makes chopped liver out of the quartet of followers dispatched to bring her to the altar, but the beheadings and amputations she visits upon her attackers are for naught, since they are immortal. 

Director Kirill Sokolov maintains the bloody action at a relentlessly fast pace, a decision that often undermines the cartoonish humor, which is as much about the profane street lingo (“Who the fuck are you?” “Take that, bitch!”) as it is about the manga-like panel framing. The through-plot is almost mind-numbingly simple—to extract Maria from these demons’ clutches, since it seems she’s decided to join them. However, once that aim is established Sokolov has not much to do but come up with one inventively gory set piece after another until the end, when he has to devise a satisfying conclusion to the mayhem and ends up with an over-complicated solution that requires more careful thought on the part of the viewers than they’ve been led to believe the movie would demand. With John Wick, at least, you knew exactly where he was supposed to land. 

The Last Dance, in Cantonese, opens May 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

They Will Kill You opens May 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Last Dance home page in Japanese

They Will Kill You home page in Japanese

The Last Dance photo (c) 2024 Emperor Film Production Company Limited

They Will Kill You photo (c) 2026 Warner Bros. Ent.