Last Updated on November 7, 2020 by rob
Strangling a Hong Kong prostitute for her passport Chinese mainlander Yan (Wu Chien-Lien) tricks her way into the territory, seduces and traps a taxi driver (Lai Yiu-Cheung) in his home and settles down to await the arrival of her sinister criminal husband (Moses Chan Yo). But when the taxi driver’s mother arrives with the man’s daughter, Yan kills again. Meanwhile the murdered prostitute turns out to have a husband determined to find out who’s been travelling on his wife’s passport. When he tracks Yan to the driver’s home the stage is more than set for a right old bloodbath.
Afer being impressed by Wu Chien-Lien’s performance as a female assassin in Beyond Hypothermia I thought I’d give her next film a try and I wasn’t disappointed. Intruder’s apparent failure at the HK box-office as well as the rumour that the local audience so identified the main characters ruthlessness with that of the actress playing her that it effectively put an end to Chien-Lien’s film career – at least as a leading lady – seems in retrospect very unfair indeed. This is one intense and gruelling thriller with a strong sense of place and infused with more than a splash of Grand Guignol horror. Chien-Lien is a frightening and yet not unsympathetic lead as the remorseless killer doing it all for love (in the form of a husband whose offscreen presence for most of the film leads one to suspect that the phone conversations between them might just be taking place entirely in her own head).
In fact her husband is for real but when he finally arrives the reason for keeping Wayne Lai’s taxi driver alive all this time becomes horrifically clear. Both of them need passports to travel in Hong Kong (fingerprints, y’see) but the husband doesn’t have any hands because they’ve been chewed off by police dogs! He needs a new pair of hands, which means… Not lost on Hong Kong audiences of the time is the significance of Wu and her husband as mainland Chinese criminals who sneak into the territory of Hong Kong to literally possess the body parts of an innocent Hongkie. With the handover to the Chinese just a few years away at the time this was released you don’t have to be any kind of genius to see Intruder as another populist expression of fear at what the territory’s loss of sovereignty would mean for its people (On The Run is another cracking example from this period).
As powerful as all this is Intruder has more going for it than horror kicks (although I must confess to raising a smile at the gruesome sight of a pair of freshly severed arms in an ice box with the fingers still twitching). The nightmare situation Wayne Lai’s taxi-driver finds himself in – literally gaffer-taped to a wheelchair and wrapped up like a mummy as he awaits a dreadful fate – leads him to reflect on how selfishly he’s behaved in abandoning his own daughter to the care of his mother. And as the long night wears on, the details of Lai’s pathetic life eke out (in bitter contrast to the initial meeting between the two in which Wu posed as a needy prostitute to Lai’s braggart client), escape attempts are made and foiled and Chien-Lien shows unexpected sympathy to the little girl she’s abducted but finds herself unable to kill.
Her husband of course has no such compunction and once he turns up the little girl ends up captured, buried and almost drowned before finally escaping by getting washed downriver in a raging torrent. It’s a nail-bitingly intense climax and on a technical level Intruder is extremely well done, especially its noir-ish cinematography. Director Tsang Kan-Cheung really knows how to establish a sense of place. He’s very good at laying out the geography of Lai’s flat, in which the bulk of the action unfolds. On the strength of this it’s a shame he never directed again even though he’s forged a highly successful career as a screenwriter, Kung-Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer amongst them. As with Beyond Hypothermia, if you can find this one with the original Cantonese audio and without cuts, strongly recommended.
