Laughter in the Dark
by Daryl Li
I first encountered the work of Fruit Chan in Durian Durian (2000), a brooding film about sex workers, modern life, and alienation. In the ensuing years, I grew more familiar with Chan’s oeuvre, but it remained difficult to pin down his work, spanning a variety of themes and genres. His work would always seem undecided to me, as though it was unsure of what it wanted to be.
In 2015, I attended a screening of Chan’s The Midnight After (2014) at a local film festival. I knew next to nothing about the film at the time, and was drawn to it purely because the cast featured a few of my favorite actors and its Chinese title (那夜凌晨，我坐上了旺角開往大埔的紅 VAN) was charmingly long.
The Midnight After follows a minibus full of passengers one night in Hong Kong. The rest of the world appears to vanish after they emerge from a tunnel. At first, they speculate that they are the last people alive in Hong Kong. However, facing what appears to be a deadly contagious disease and a mysterious stalker in a gas mask, this ragtag bunch of strangers bands together, attempting to piece together what has happened. Their investigations at first lead them to fragmented references to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi incident, before they eventually learn that they have somehow traveled six years into the future, and the world has gone disturbingly quiet in the aftermath of nuclear disaster.
I emerged from the theater in a deep confusion. It wasn’t that the film was hard to understand, but I was struggling to wrap my head around how it worked. I suppose this was a sign—all love begins in feelings of confusion.
The Midnight After may best be described as melange. Conceptually audacious, its plot treads the fine line between fantasy and absurdity. Tonally, there are major and sudden shifts, as evinced by its use of multiple genres, one of its most distinctive features. Chan’s film starts off as a horror film of some sort, but quickly introduces suggestions that would be at home as an episode of The Twilight Zone. Then, it mixes things up with its turning into a musical, then a music video. As it unfolds, it moves into something seemingly exploitatively dramatic, before quickly transforming into crass black comedy. Topping it all off, the finale brings together action sequences, sci-fi paranoia, melodrama, David Bowie, and comic relief bordering on the slapstick—none of this should work, but it does.
As a long-time fan of the Mr Vampire franchise—shifting from horror to action to comedy within the same film, and even switching target audiences from film to film—I am familiar with such genre play in Hong Kong cinema. Yet The Midnight After impresses with its commitment to careening across a spectrum of genres with apparent relish.
The film remained on my mind for months, and I watched it again—this time on video—as soon as I could. It then occurred to me that I had gone from the thoughtful, gloomy drama of Durian Durian to the gratuitous horror of both versions of Dumplings, and at every turn, Chan’s mastery of form and trenchant satirical voice shone through. The Midnight After’s incongruity was deliberate and self-aware. It was not that his work was undecided, but that it was indeterminate, refusing classification and exceeding boundaries.
The Midnight After is a film about difficult and dark topics. Disaster, the environment, our appetite for environmental destruction and propensity for cruelty—all framed against ideas such as the unsettling inextricability between violence and justice or the relationship between ethics and society. These are themes or topics that are difficult to describe, and rather unpalatable, but at different points, on different levels, this film succeeds.
If the film’s major narrative conceit—that the characters have somehow been displaced in time—may simplistically be thought of as reflecting the collapse of time in the event of a disaster like Fukushima, then the seemingly reckless use of genre signifiers is analogous to the failure of language in the face of catastrophe. Perhaps The Midnight After’s constant destabilization of genre performs a type of failure, as though one set of tools is insufficient in trying to describe the disaster at hand. Isn’t this true of language in the face of a disaster on such a scale? After all, genres are communicative tool, sets of signifiers, almost like a language. The Midnight After embraces cinema’s lexicon in order to perform its break-down.
Yet perhaps “failure” is too harsh a word. These genre indicators still mean something to us, even as they are shown to be faltering. Nevertheless, they suggest that what The Midnight After seeks to express are things that lie outside the basic tools of expression available to it, just as this piece of writing is an attempt to express something that exceeds the words available to it. In film and writing alike, we must attend to the gaps, the lacunae, to name the unnameable. And so, even in the aftermath of disaster, in the failure of language, something comes through.
It is impossible to explain love. The Midnight After is an imperfect film, sustained by remarkable performances and vigorous direction. Still, I fell in love with it because of its potent strangeness and exceptional daring. It renewed my faith in cinematic expression. Freed from the restrictions of the language it has adopted, it speaks of the language itself, and manages to capture meanings that, on paper, should not be possible.
With its sci-fi turns, seemingly naïve conviction in its premise, and unabashed use of genre tropes, The Midnight After is clearly less interested in a realistic presentation of nuclear disaster, but instead begins to describe the immeasurable effects of disaster and the intangible force that it has on the psyche. It finds synergy in incongruity, meaning in the failure of language, laughter in the dark—expressing the chaos, human violence, and true costs of our still unfolding environmental catastrophe.
Daryl Li is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Singapore. His essay focusing on Stanley Kwan's Center Stage was longlisted for the 2018 Australian Book Review Calibre Prize. His work has been published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and will also be collected in the Food Republic anthology forthcoming from Landmark Books. He currently works as an editor.