Please excuse the worst title I could come up with to preface Fruit Chan’s demented aborted-fetus-chomping shocker Dumplings, but being a 9-to-5er during film fest season and attempting to keep up an ongoing blog is starting to take its toll. It’s an apt description though, since it’s going to be a while before I can enjoy dim sum without having flashbacks of Bai Ling feeding finely chopped, boiled fetus flesh to Miriam Yeung, whose crunchy, crispy chewing suggests perhaps the bones weren’t extracted prior to mincing!

Surely to elicit divisive reactions, Dumplings refuses to be boxed in, perching uneasily on the genre fence: too consciously repulsive for the arthouse, and too austerely stylized for the horror crowd expecting Cat III thrills in the vein of Herman Yau’s incredible 1993 sickie The Untold Story (which it shares similarities with). Underneath the mondo-worthy gross-outs (those stomach-churningly realistic fetuses!), the film wrestles with issues such as ageing, abortion, vanity, and class. And there’s even a junkie subtext somewhere in there (“I want the most potent stuff, now”). It’s a confronting and disturbing film, blending outrageously jet-black drollery and harrowing true-crime realism while Chris Doyle’s unfailingly gorgeous lensing lifts the material to an entirely new aesthetic level.—AY