Writer-director Evan Jackson Leong’s tale of a street-smart illegal immigrant who gets taken under the wing of a charismatic older gangster follows a well-worn plot beat-for-beat, right down to the inevitable montage in the midsection set to slinky pop. The kicker is that the apprentice and the master are women, exhibiting much the same unflinching ruthlessness you would find in a Martin Scorsese, Johnnie To or Park Chan-wook movie, but with a little less violence. But that doesn’t mean no violence: at one point, New York Chinatown kingpin Dai Mah (Jade Wu), a character based on a real female crime boss, slits a man’s throat with the effortless focus of a butcher slaughtering a pig, and barely gets a drop of blood on her dowdy polyester housecoat.
The deliberately chintzy costume design adds a subtle spark of authenticity, underscoring that these are people who care very little about what they look like. Dai Mah and her lieutenant Sister Tse (a magnetic Shuya Chang) are laser-focused on the goal of making money by any means possible – in Dai Mah’s case because she is greedy and power mad. Sister Tse, on the other hand, needs to pay off a $57,000 debt to Dai Mah, the price to have herself trafficked to the US. As Tse’s voiceover explains, she didn’t come looking for anything so common as a better life: she is there to find her daughter who was taken from her eight years ago and adopted by an American couple while Tse languished in jail. That maternal goal means she will put up with a lot, such as enforced sex work for a short spell (she catches Dai Mah’s eye by nearly killing a vicious pimp with a metal chain), the drudgery of debt collection and hours of dumpling making in the kitchen alongside kindly African immigrant Zareeb (Yacine Djoumbaye), who speaks French, Mandarin and English.
While the underlying structure is undeniably generic, the film-makers have poured care into the details, from the use of convincingly grotty locations to the woozy, smeary camerawork by Ray Huang that recalls the dreamy atmosphere of early Wong Kar-wai. Even the soft, hazy cello-intensive score has a Wong vibe, but somehow the package as a whole feels like a smooth synthesis of elements instead of a derivative rip-off.
• Snakehead is released on 1 August on digital platforms.
