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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
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Review | Peg O’ My Heart movie review: striking visuals, awful story in Nick Cheung horror thriller

Andy Lau cameo can’t save Cheung’s film starring himself, Fala Chen and Terrance Lau that is heavy on style but lacks convincing backstories

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Fala Chen and Nick Cheung in a still from Peg O’ My Heart (category: IIB, Cantonese). Directed by Nick Cheung and co-starring Terrence Lau.
Edmund Lee

2.5/5 stars

Nick Cheung Ka-fai is one of the most prominent active Hong Kong actors to have dabbled in directing, and in doing so has proved himself a talented visual stylist and world builder with a penchant for the dark and supernatural.

But the main reason Cheung is not known as a visionary filmmaker is that, despite all his stylish visuals, he is a clumsy storyteller who could not fashion a convincing narrative to save his life.

In his four directing efforts to date – which include Hungry Ghost Ritual (2014), Keeper of Darkness (2015) and The Trough (2018) – he has repeatedly come up with colourful characters in memorably bizarre settings, only to squander them with subpar writing that often involves family tragedies reenacted in a cheesy way.

The nominal lead in his latest effort, Peg O’ My Heart, is Dr Man (Terrance Lau Chun-him), an unorthodox psychiatrist at a public hospital who has time and again broken protocol and taken patients’ cases into his own hands, interfering in their private lives to get results.

Man’s interactions with his doting assistant, senior nurse Donna (Rebecca Zhu Chenli), and his frustrated but protective superior – the hospital director played by Geoffrey Wong Chi-hung – make for amusing viewing that would not be out of place in a quirky sitcom.

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