Starring Nick Cheung, Terrance Lau, Fala Chen

Directed by Nick Cheung

Golden Scene – In Cinemas Now

A young psychiatrist is troubled by terrifying dreams while treating an exhausted taxi driver who is troubled by terrifying dreams.

If the three words in the English language most likely to inspire existential dread in the human heart are ‘Rail Replacement Service’ then the next three surely have to be ‘Video Art Installation’. For anyone who has not had to suffer the latter, these abominations can be found in Modern Art Galleries and involve darkened rooms where incoherent streams of images lacking any production values are badly projected, with terrible sound, in an endless loop and the audience is expected to watch admiringly while sitting on the kind of hard bench that induces acute lower back pain faster than you can say ‘Arts Council Grant’ – tax payers’ money that has gone to someone not talented enough to make an actual movie.

About ten minutes into Nick Cheung’s Lynchian Hong Kong horror thriller, Peg O’ My Heart I was having flashbacks to some of my worst art gallery experiences, albeit in a comfy chair with top of the range digital projection.

Horror cinema is by its very nature the stuff of nightmares, or rather nightmares are the stuff of horror cinema. Dreams may be surreal and superficially incoherent but we recognise that they contain nuggets of truth as our consciousnesses wrestle with our darkest secrets and urges. The problem with Cheung’s movie (in which he also stars) is that he’s forgotten that audiences can only take so much dreamy stuff. Once the nugget becomes a whole rockface, all you’re left with is the incoherence, and that’s just plain dull.

It’s a shame, because the setting is a promising one – enough to keep me in the cinema despite being seriously tempted to walk out after half an hour. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash Choi San-keung (Cheung) is an exhausted insomniac taxi driver who, we learn, was once a wealthy financial broker. After crashing his vehicle, Dr Man (Terrance Lau) seeks to unravel what it is torturing his patient; however now the psychiatrist is finding himself tortured by his own dreams. Looking for help, the doctor encounters an enigmatic gentleman who claims to be able to walk within other people’s nocturnal imaginings.

So far, so potentially intriguing, but then, at the three quarter mark, the whole thing is ‘explained’ as a rather half-baked tale of financial mismanagement, more like an episode of Rogue Traders than a horror movie.

Verdict: There’s the germ of an interesting piece of cinema here, but in the end Peg O’ My Heart struggles to get past its Video Art Installation ethic, except by turning into a public information film warning of the dangers of bad financial advice – which, after ninety long minutes, is perhaps taking the idea of caveat emptor a bit too literally. 3/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com