Venice Days screening - short review - RIGOR MORTIS by Juno Mak

A washed up movie star who recently lost his wife and child moves into a run down Hong Kong tenement flat where strange spirits, ancient spells and monsters of all kinds dangerously lurk. Juno Mak’s feature debut is a homage to the Hong Kong vampire movies of the eighties and as such it is quite an entertaining, strange post-modernist film. It is quite gory, bizarre, enigmatic and mysterious. Some parts are genuinely funny and intentionally exaggerated but the characters provide dramatic depth and Rigor Mortis is actually hyper exaggerates interesting aspects of the theme of loneliness and the fear of being forgotten. The visuals are quite stunning – it should hence come as no surprise that the film took two months to film but had a post-production stage that lasted a whole year – and the use of CGI is remarkably creative down to the last detail.