She loved soft toys when she was there. Her mother still buys soft toys on her birthday. Her parents still cut cakes and remember her in an unfathomable silence. Ching (Sheena Chan) killed herself after being raped. Her absence has left her parents as two souls who have become very uncomfortably numb. Chingโs father (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) describes his daughterโs death as an โunprecedented pain,โ which caused him much grief and suffering. To cope with Chingโs absence, his father has immersed himself in the teachings of Jesus, and now he has become a pastor. His wife (Louisa So) has failed to overcome her pain and is still overwhelmed by the tragedy.
Chingโs father, the pastor, coincidentally chances upon Chan (George Au) โ the boy who is responsible for Chingโs death โ when he is found homeless on the street. Reluctantly, the pastor decides โ perhaps momentarily tortured by his religious teachings โ to provide him refuge inside the church premises, where a room was vacant. Lam Sen and Antonio Tam Sin-Yeungโs 2024 film โValley of the Shadow of Deathโ smoothly jumps back and forth in a simplistic, hyperbolic manner to explore poignancy, repentance, and the inadequacies of religious teachings that couldnโt equip a man with substantial wisdom to transcend his grief and erase the instinct of vendetta from his soul.
The film forays into portraying two parties, affected by suffering, either trying to cope with something or repenting and paying a heavy price for earlier offensive sins. It deals with a very Gen Z problem that has its roots in contemporary digital malfeasance. A staged coquetry leads to the circulation of an obscene photograph of Chan, which drives him wild to take revenge by committing a rape, and the total act culminates in Chingโs suicide.
With conversations, sometimes between Chan and the pastor, at times between the pastor and his wife, the narrative softly shifts from present to past and peeks into the epicentre of the traumatic event. While focusing upon the crime, the camera zooms back very steadily and evokes a hollow space filled with faint, excruciating cries, coming, as if, from a distance. The entire construction could make you regard it as a typical Ozu-esque scene formation.
The film consistently jumps back, on particularly relevant occasions, to churn up past events โ sometimes in the form of nostalgia, at times enveloped in nightmare โ but it doesnโt provoke us or meet the anticipated discomfort that it should have caused.
For Chanโs part, the anachronistic representations partially succeed because the momentary animosity that Chan felt for Ching when, all of a sudden, the girlโs coquetry was demystified to him and left him bewildered, works well to justify Chanโs later repentance, encountered through the electrifying construction of a nightmare. But in the case of the girlโs mother, Chingโs memories seem merely nostalgic, enveloped in a bitter longing that fails to rationalize her rage.
However, I could accept Sen and Sin-Yeungโs claim if they argue that their aim was not to unsettle the audience or portray the girlโs experience as harrowing simply to justify the pastorโs later generosity, his wifeโs fury, or Chanโs repentance. Instead, their intention may have been to interrogateโand exposeโthe loopholes in these charactersโ psychological responses, the very coping mechanisms they each construct to survive a crisis, however self-chosen or purgatorial those efforts may be.
This intention is well established in a sequence, divided into two scenes, where Chingโs mother spots Chan in the same church to which her husband is affiliated, and in the next scene, inside a car, where the pastor tries in vain to console her. In that scene, the pastorโs generosity is sharply questioned by his wife, who once believed fervently but has since lost all faith in a higher power.
His theologically grounded declarationsโโI am a pastor. I must bear the cross of Jesus. I must forgive our enemies. Humans arenโt qualified to forgive sinners. Only God is โฆ We must give him another chanceโโare abruptly and forcefully dismantled when she responds, โWhoโll give me a chance? For three years, my heart has hurt every day. Every time I think of my daughter, itโs like stabbing a knife into my own heart.โ
This crossfire of words or duel of dialogues sets the stage for a climax that we donโt see coming. Chingโs motherโs every word perhaps makes the pastor rethink everything, as if the words pierce through his religious veil. Although Chan pays a heavy priceโcarrying a wooden cross in an act of atonement under the pastorโs supervision, captured in a beautifully assembled montageโhis penance ultimately fails to move the pastor. In the moments leading to the denouement, the pastor abandons the very sacred teachings he preaches and takes revenge by forcing Chanโs head underwater, casting aside the moral authority he once invoked.
In that scene, Sen and Sin-Yeung evocatively intersperse Chingโs images that almost work like a cataclysm, but the anti-climax occurs when the girlโs mother comes to save Chan. The makerโs intentions were clear. They did not set out to craft a thriller meant to crawl under our skin, but rather to explore religion as a possible coping mechanism for personal crisis. Yet the film is held backโpartly by its over-dramatic turns and partly by its less deft, less subtle handling of the anachronistic sequencesโfrom becoming the stronger work it might have been.
