NOOB FILM REVIEW - HUNGRY GHOST DINER directed by We Jun Cho
It tells a story about Bonnie, who runs a food truck business selling noodles in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. It was at the brink of the MCO and also the annual Hungry Ghost Festival.
Her uncle dropped by her food truck and had a chat. Then she drove back to her hometown in Behrang, Perak just to find out that her uncle actually passed away.
Bonnie possesses the special gift of seeing the dead since she was a kid. She almost forgotten about it and now she just got a reminder of that.
The film slowly unfolds Bonnie’s background story. She learnt about the art of making noodles from her parents running the kopitiam and noodle shop in the town of Behrang, since she was small. They inherited the business from her grandmother. The MCO, Hungry Ghost Festival, and her special gift are used nicely as literary device to take Bonnie through her character redemption arc, which leads her to make amends for her past and with her father.
Lies not so deep in the subtext is about first learning from the older generation’s wisdom, before going forward into the future blind and unguided. Bonnie rushes into doing her food truck business mainly because she was dissatisfied with her father, especially after her mother’s death, which led to the eventual closure of their inherited Kopitiam business.
Oh, the pandemic. How that has shaped all of our lives.
This film is also a subtle critique of the decline of the Malaysian’s ‘pekan koboi’ state of economics, which many young generations have tried to breathe new life into. One way (in Bonnie’s case), is by transforming it into a food truck business, a franchise, or a brand. But unfortunately, that takes out the whole charm, romance, and soul of the whole thing. We have to stop trying to mechanise and computerise everything, and sometimes sticking to the roots and the core originality and identity of it all is the best way to go.
That shot sequence of the old abandoned dining table, shown to rewinds slowly into its glorious past. Ahh. Don’t we all miss the old days. But it is also about moving forward, the right way. By not forgetting who you are and where you come from.
The love how the song performed by Keat Yoke Chen, who also plays Bonnie, binds together with the story and the narrative. I love Eric Chen's performance as a patient and stoic yet loving father. And like how Bonnie’s dead uncle, played by Sam Chong, said about the parallel between her father’s character and durians. Even though it's spiky on the outside and stinks on the surface, beneath it is soft flesh and blood.
And I love how durians are used as allegories in many Malaysian literature - in comic strip, ‘It’s a Durian Life’ by C.W. Kee, the infamous film ‘The Big Durian’ by Amir Muhammad. ‘Rivers of Exploding Durians’ by Edmund Yeo and none other than ‘Snow in Midsummer’, where it also uses the supernatural as a narrative, and it breaks open a durian with blood in it in the poster.
Perhaps it is a lamentation and a perfect allegory of being alienated in a land of your birth. It is ever so tricky now in being independent with a system that feeds on division instead of unity. The stance of living in it is a mark of acceptance of its absurdism. Despite the ‘foul smell’, we all rejoice in its bittersweetness as a seasonal ‘plat du jour’. Oh, the irony. Life has to go on.
During a recent FINAS programme, the participants recognises that race-based fragmentation of the film industry is the main reason why we are at this state. But a poetry in a fiction such as this will not be possible without it. Its blessing in disguise.
The poster is actually showing a wish of most of us for all to have a ‘makan-makan’ for another time, like the good old days. Ahhh the inner yearning towards nostalgia in all of us. Yet the Buddhism teaching of living in a present before it changes in becoming the past. Living in regrets for the loss is not they way.
Just like how Sam Chong’s ghostly character saying it to Bonnie, now he also doing it to us all post-humously, through this film. I was shocked to learn of his death after watching this film. May his soul rest in peace.
This film has been shot in glorious Malaysian colors. It premiered in the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival on June 30th 2023 and was subsequently awarded the NETPAC Award for the best Asian feature film. A great start for We Jun Cho in his debut!
It is still on Netflix!
Official Trailer