I wish I had more context and experience to bring to this wild, science-fiction horror comedy, featuring 17 passengers on a late-night public bus in Hong Kong who come out of a long traffic tunnel to discover that everyone else in the world has disappeared. Director Fruit Chan captures a few quiet scenes of eerie, urban stillness before drastically accelerating the pace and the camera movements, resulting in a dizzying rush of plot, emotions, and violence (especially as the passengers begin to turn on each other). There are too many characters for any of them to register as more than types, though that may be the point. From the soccer-loving couple to the teen miscreants to the young tech head, each seems to be a pointed stand-in for a segment of Hong Kong society. Throw in references to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, the SARS crisis, and Hong Kong’s unique political status as a special administrative region of China, and The Midnight After clearly has some sort of commentary on its mind. But as the mystery only expanded with more and more possibilities (none of which are fully resolved) and the dynamics among the passengers got uglier and uglier (including a horrible and repeatedly depicted rape), I lost the heart to try and keep up.
