Sam Quah’s Chinese remake of his own Malaysian thriller from 2022 is a film literally dripping in sin. It’s set in 2006 during the clean-up after the tsunami, with the ceiling at the local high school leaking due to the incessant rain. After the pupils punt origami boats out on the college lake, mute loner Tong (Shengdi Wang) is smeared in glue and tortured by the resident girl gang. So if liquid-sloshing Quah hasn’t seen Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, by the time a mackintosh-sporting psycho is dicing up the bullies it’s clear he must be a fan of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Tong’s mother, willowy school cleaner Li Han (Janine Chang), is one suspect on the police’s list – though seemingly off the hook when her daughter also goes missing. Quah came out as a Hitchcock admirer in his 2019 film Sheep Without a Shepherd with its cinephile protagonist; he aims to give this follow-up a similar dexterity. Li Han is revealed to have an abusive past, the police chief is covering for the school principal who is father to one of Tong’s tormentors – and there’s the secret the local philanthropist is harbouring regarding Lin (Wang Chuanjun), a worker at his foundation.
This mesh of culpability is somewhat overworked, with a good number of Quah’s feints and contrivances heavy-handed – especially the police chief’s voyeur son, whose extracurricular filming activities conveniently tie up plot questions. The director also aspires to give A Place Called Silence a certain thematic heft, with an interest in how it is that people become morally corrupted. The film is so busy, though, that rather than sounding each character’s inner darkness, there’s only time to throw a cheap blanket of nihilism over the whole thing.
Quah still shows undeniable artistry, with a recursive structure curling back to reveal new iniquities in the community’s past. And he has a flair for punctuating this with striking set pieces, such as the assembly hall drum performance that ends with a Carrie-like shocker. There’s enough ambition here to suggest he could graduate on to stronger things.
• A Place Called Silence is in UK cinemas from 2 August.
