A view to a kill

One part The Untold Story (1993), one part 12 Angry Men (1957), first-time feature director Ho Cheuk-tin's The Sparring Partner certainly takes stylistic and formal risks that are foreign to police procedurals and courtroom dramas. Based on the sordid, tabloid-ready 2013 murders of Glory Chau Wing-ki and Moon Siu Yuet-yee in Tai Kok Tsui, whose gruesome details of dismemberment and pseudo-cannibalism occupied headlines for weeks, The Sparring Partner plays with space and time to dip into questions of mindset and motivation, and hazard several guesses as to what might have caused a 28-year-old man and his pal to slaughter the man's parents. We watch the young men plot the murders, and watch the jury watching them, with the legal teams on the periphery debating precedent and accountability. It's a novel effect, and one that doesn't always work, but credit must go to Ho for trying to breathe fresh air into a stale genre.