Coffin Homes

Set in the perhaps unlikely world of Hong Kong’s astronomically priced housing market, Coffin Homes plays fast and loose with its satire, as auteur Fruit Chan conducts a swirling chaos of genres, involving haunted apartments, a truculent but playful ghost child, hilariously extravagant splatter horror, rotten estate agents, landlords, gangs, and even an appearance by the underworld’s Ghost King. With storylines as compartmentalised and disordered as the tenants’ cramped cubicles, Chan still maintains his interest in social realist depictions of Hong Kong’s grassroots life and anxieties over the city’s future.

‘Originally, this was not a ghost movie, it was meant to be my kind of humanistic movie. But last year, when the pandemic situation was quite severe, my investor offered to start a Hong Kong production that wouldn’t require going through mainland Chinese censors. There were no ghosts in my original script, but since haunted flats are a step into the housing problems that my story addresses, I took three weeks to come up with a new draft. Haunted houses are a common plot device in movies, so the biggest question for me is how I should handle that. I don’t want to just follow the usual practices of genre movies – but I can’t do without them either.’

Director Fruit Chan, from an interview with South China Morning Post.