Sellers' Market

Films: Dream Home (Wai dor lei ah yat ho)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

I’m not sure what I expected with Dream Home (or Wai dor lei ah yat ho if you prefer), but it wasn’t what I got. The elevator pitch of this one seems like it should be a comedy, or at least that it could be a comedy. A woman, desperate to purchase a flat in over-priced Hong Kong, saves up for years for her dream apartment. When the deal falls through because of the owners’ greed, she goes on a killing rampage to, for lack of a better way to say it, lower the market value of the real estate.

Tell me that’s not a great pitch for a comedy/horror movie. It has enough reality to be relatable (the movie is from just after the sub-prime mortgage crash) but a great deal of potential for some funny deaths, the sort of wacky hijinks that are common in a standard horror comedy. That is absolutely not what we get in Dream Home. This is a surprisingly dark and brutal movie with substantial, shocking gore moments that come out of nowhere. I think we’re supposed to sympathize with the main character as well, something I found impossible to do.