Fantasia Review: Get Your Thriller Fix with ‘Legally Declared Dead’
Pound for pound, Legally Declared Dead is about as lean a murder-mystery thriller as you can get. All the dressings you would come to expect from a modern thriller are accounted for. The suspense. The twists. The mystery. All there and deployed with strict adherence to the principles of the genre. It’s efficient, even if it comes at the price of being formulaic, but Legally Declared Dead keeps you on the hook just long enough to see the credits rolls.
Our protagonist for this story is Sean Yip, an insurance broker tasked with assessing life insurance claims. Life for this Hong Kong resident is good. His career is on the up-and-up and he‘s going steady with his criminal psychologist girlfriend. But domestic happiness is disrupted when the insurance policy of Tak and Ling Chu comes across his desk. Tasked with scoping out their policy, Sean visits their home where he witness the apparent suicide of the Chu’s son. Given the recency of their insurance plan, he is suspicious of the Chus. Only 18 months ago they took out this policy and within a month of it going into effect their son ‘conveniently’ dies. It’s not long before the Chus come knocking on the Sean’s door asking for their payout, but for a man committed to his job, it’s a tough sell to buy, and soon he dives head first into an investigative rabbit hole that threatens his life.
Much of Legally Declared Dead’s influence can be traced back to the juggernaut of the genre, Silence of the Lambs, and the similarities are striking. In the same way Clarice enlists the help of Hannibal to psychoanalyze Buffalo Bill, Sean calls upon his girlfriend and her professor to probe the habits of their suspects. As Sean digs deeper and deeper into the death of the Chu’s son, relics of his past start to resurface in a similar fashion as Clarice’s. And both killers in their respective films draw on and evoke the problematic ‘otherness’ trope that vilifies individuals with minority status. Plus, even your insect allegory is present, but instead of a cicada director Kim-Wai Yuen opts for a regional prying mantis. The parallels are clear, but if you’re gonna create a facsimile of another film, at least it’s based on one of the most prolific films in the genre to ever do it.
As much as the film borrows, the thriller template is admittedly executed quite well. The film keeps suspicions in check for most of the film as evidence builds. It points you in wrong direction only to twist you around with new evidence. And there’s a climactic bow of fates that brings Sean within inches of his life as he confronts the killer. All standard fair, but done in a way that engages the viewer more than it deters. Afterall, I would be lying if I didn’t wince once or twice when things got hairy.
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