DREAM HOME
DVD region 2. Network Releasing.

I first caught Dream Home as the opening movie at 2010’s Mayhem Festival, where it set the wrongness bar pretty high. Now, it comes to DVD, and thankfully has lost none of it’s impact; in fact, I think a enjoyed it rather more the second time around.

Josie Ho plays Cheng, a woman with an obsession – she is determined to own her own flat in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. But in 2007, house prices in Hong Kong are making Britain’s housing market seem sensible, and while she is working two jobs to save the money, the prices keep going up. Eventually, she is forced to take drastic measures to force the value of the flat she wants down – tooling up with DIY gear, she breaks into the building and begins a systematic slaughter of neighbouring tenants.

There are no spoilers in that synopsis, by the way – the film opens with Ho’s initial murder and then tells the back story and current events through a series of intercutting flashbacks, where we see her childhood dreams, her miserable life and her increasing desperation as the sellers suddenly hike up the prices at the last minute. You can almost sympathise with her plight, especially as all her victims are portrayed in a negative light – the flat full of stoners, the social climbers and the hypocrites (more or less every man in this film seems to be cheating on his wife). Of course, in reality, Ho is just as awful as anyone on Location, Location, Location, willing to sacrifice her life and everyone else’s just to live in a ‘better’, more expensive and more investment-worthy property. The film is only too aware of this, and the final scene is a nice little kick in the teeth for our heroine, who may have gotten away with murder, but is not necessarily going to profit from it.

Dream Home twists and turns through its story with great skill – it would be easy for something with this sort of structure to come unglued – and delivers some of the most outrageous, brutal and shocking moments of violence you will ever see. All the deaths here are long and painful (for Ho too, as she rarely comes out of a killing unscathed) and the film frequently reaches new levels of bad taste – but does so with such style and imagination that it never descends to the level of a mere gorefest. And the satirical side of the film, with it’s digs at our fixations with the ‘property ladder’, is never overstated.

Josie Ho is excellent in the lead role, making someone who is pretty monstrous someone we can relate to, and she does a good job portraying a woman who has been pushed into her situation through desperation – albeit a desperation of her own making. Some of you may well see something of yourself in her!

More cynical and edgy than most Hong Kong cinema, Dream Home is pretty wonderful, and well worth picking up – if your homeowner budget allows.

The DVD comes with a video interview with Ho and a booklet written by Billy Chainsaw that I haven’t seen but am sure is an excellent addition to the package.

DAVID FLINT

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