An interrogator and his subject are under the scrutiny of Hui’s camera as he dives into a murky part of Singapore’s legal history through a highly psychological mode that will interest adventurous cinephiles with a discerning taste for the avant-garde.
Review #2,934
Dir. Daniel Hui
2024 | Singapore | Drama, Experimental | 103min | 1.37:1 | English, Mandarin & Malay
Refused Classification – would otherwise likely be NC16 for coarse language and some mature themes
Cast: Vicki Yang, Irfan Kasban
Plot: A woman is being interrogated in a dark room by a stern young man on a rainy night. As the hours pass, identities and historical time periods begin to blur. Her testimony becomes a scrambled, personal record of her country’s complicated legal history.
Awards: Official Selection (Rotterdam)
International Sales: 13 Little Pictures
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Legal History; Interrogation; Memory
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex/Experimental
Pace: Slow
Audience Type: Niche Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
Although unceremoniously banned in its home country, I’m confident that Singaporeans will be able to view it like any other local film once it is overturned someday in the future when the more open (and much cooler) youths of today take up positions of political power and decide what kind of Singapore they want to live in.
In the meantime, Small Hours of the Night will stay partly hidden in the shadows, like its characters as lit and framed with poetic abstraction by writer-director Daniel Hui and his crew.
It’s not a work for everyone, but it will interest more adventurous cinephiles with a discerning taste for the avant-garde. Hui’s experimental, slow cinema mode of address is matched ably by its stark visuals, which centre on an interrogator and his subject.
Through the course of a restless night (or infinite nights, weeks, months, years, and even decades, such is the film’s slippery engagement with time), a few of Singapore’s controversial judicial cases are scrutinised, particularly the 1983 Tan Chay Wa tombstone trial that underpins the entire film’s cry for some kind of historical clarity that no official textbook will ever oblige.
“Because I think there’s a demon inside of me. It’s a demon called freedom.”
From political dissidents to child murderers, Hui leverages these fascinating cases by surrounding them with requisite murkiness, leading us into a dark rabbit hole that threatens to consume even the audience, such is the film’s rather aggressive use of sound and music.
In fact, I was sold the moment the restless sound of thundering drums crashed into a scene that marked the end of the first act, one that Hui would hold for a long time (well, the percussion was that good).
The film’s deep dive into legal history is a highly psychological one, and therefore, any fear from the authorities that it is a work of distortion and subversion is largely unfounded, when its very essence resides in the swirling subjectivities that define the national imagination.
With Small Hours, Hui the filmmaker-archaeologist shows us what Singapore cinema has been missing since its renaissance in the ‘90s—that desire to excavate the hidden, unsavoury bits of our nation’s past, and deal with them with the creative burst of energy of an artist committed not so much to objective truth but the interpretive prospect of an open conversation about how we have come to be.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 