After America, the true crime phenomenon is slowly but surely affecting the rest of the world’s cinematography, and not even China, or more precisely Hong Kong, where this thriller – court drama, was filmed – was not immune to this scourge. Of course, it would be strange if there were no morbid and sick cases of murder in a country with more than a billion inhabitants, and the film, written by the experienced Frankie Tam as a screenwriter, and by debutant director Ho Cheuk-Tin, found inspiration in one such real case. In 2013, a 28-year-old man brutally killed his parents in Hong Kong and then disposed of their remains.
He fried parts of their bodies in a microwave oven, kept their heads in a chest, so it is not surprising that this case attracted serious attention from the media and the public. Almost a decade later, a full-length film was made about this morbid case, which was largely ruined by unnecessary stylizations and complications, constant flashbacks and dreamlike sequences in which the killer imagines himself as – Hitler. And “The Sparring Partner” is as much a courtroom drama as it is a thriller because we get to know the Hong Kong justice system there as one of the plot lines follows nine jurors who have to decide whether the defendants are guilty of these gruesome crimes.
The situation is all the more dramatic because in addition to the 28-year-old son Henry, who confessed to the murders, his marginally retarded friend Angus was also accused. The main question facing the jury is whether Angus committed that heinous crime together with Henry, and through flashbacks and the presentation of evidence during the trial, we learn the details, but also the background of the whole story. The story here is conceived in a bit of a Rasomon style, because Henry and Angus have their own versions of the events and it is all quite contradictory, but apart from the fact that the interesting story is blown up with unnecessary stylizations and constant jumps through time, the film is unnecessarily stretched to almost two and a half hours.