Soi Cheang's directorial precision along with Louis Koo's performance bring gravitas to a conceptual framework that could have easily been too far fetched to take seriously and yet Accident works, delivering a rapturously engaging paranoia-tinged thriller which manages emotional sustenance alongside its continuously engaging escapist narrative underpinnings. Near-Hitchcockian in the way the film's narrative unfolds, the film is solely rooted in the subjectivity of our main protagonist, a hitman whose become increasingly convinced there is a hit out for his head. Paranoia is embedded into this film's sense of general unease, and our main protagonist - a hitman who stages elaborate hits via choreographed accidents - in a sense becomes a slave to his own tactical precision, becoming increasingly incapable of deciphering reality from those which he has once choreographed, incapable of grounding the world in objectivity. Accident lives in a space in which the audience simply is uncertain about what they are experiencing for much of its running time, and in the film's resolution - which I won't spoil here - the audience is provided clarity both thematically and narratively. In a sense, Accident subtextually seems to be a commentary on insularity, encapsulating how for our main protagonist's fate is fundamentally rooted in his insular nature, one in which his tactical precision and general vocation has alienated him, inn a sense, from any capability of trusting something he does not control. A highly entertaining piece of paranoia which would make a good double-feature with The Conversation, Accident is a highly entertaining, extremely well-made film that also has some understated thematic weight. Oh, and it features some incredible set-pieces that would make the Final Destination series proud.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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