Burnt Offerings

OF THE DIRECTORS WHO CAME TO INTERNATIONAL PROMINENCE DURING the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema, Ringo Lam wasn’t the most ingeniously adaptable, the most shameless, the most baroque in style, or the most extravagant in violence (though in those last two categories he could more than excel). What Lam’s films were unsurpassed in, though, was temperature—the sheer blistering, blast-furnace heat of their passionate hatreds.

This was the era of a pop cinephile culture that encouraged the cultivation of directorial signatures—John Woo’s crucifixes and doves, Wong Jing’s cardsharp showdowns—and for his own trademark, Lam chose fire. His breakthrough film, 1987’s , caught alight, and the conflagration spread through his oeuvre. It wasn’t just an image, but a temperament. Heated expressions of disaffection were common in the movies produced in venal, undemocratic, chronically corrupt Hong Kong, but Lam operated at a whole different thermometer-bursting temperature of rage, fanning the flames through film after film. (1987), which concludes with inmate Chow Yun-fat gargling the blood of sadistic captor Roy Cheung after chewing off a chunk of his face? I can’t think of one—and after the 1997 Handover, which accelerated the already-incoming end of Hong Kong cinema’s last Golden Age, it’s hard to imagine another.