Movie Reviews
Review | Peg O’ My Heart: great visuals, awful story in Nick Cheung horror thriller
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.
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.