Three: Going Home

Story and production

The film centers on Yu Fai (Leon Lai), a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine who has spent three years keeping his wife's corpse at home, washing it each day with herbal remedies while hoping she will come back to life.² A widowed police officer, Wai (Eric Tsang), moves with his eight-year-old son into a soon-to-be-demolished apartment block where the only other residents are Yu, his wife, and a silent girl in a red coat. When the boy goes missing, Wai enters the couple's apartment, finds the wife dead in the bathtub, and is taken hostage by Yu.^{3 • 10} Reviewers note that a final twist turns the story from horror into a tragedy of love and unresolved grief.^{3 • 11}

Locations and look. Christopher Doyle's cinematography gives the film its distinctive muted green and gray palette, conveying decay and melancholy.³ Principal locations were the former Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters, now the PMQ creative hub, and an old-style photography studio, both of which the M+ museum describes as adding eeriness and abandonment to the supernatural romance.²

Because the segment was successful at the box office, Chan developed Going Home into a longer standalone version for separate release, adding approximately four minutes of material.^{12 • 3}

Interpretation

Scholars have read the film as an allegory of Hong Kong after the 1997 handover. The M+ program notes that the imaginative effort of preserving the dead speaks of the city's post-handover prospects, with the script's method of "preserving the corpse" reflecting Hong Kong people's hopes for the future after 1997.¹² One academic account describes the story as that of a monomaniacal husband tending his wife's body in the belief she will come back to him, a motif of retarding change that echoes the line "May this moment stay forever" in the crime film Victim (1999).⁷

A book chapter by Yueh Yu Emilie Yeh and Hei Tung Neda Ng, scholars publishing on Hong Kong horror, treats Three: Going Home and Three Extremes: Dumplings as signature Applause Pictures horror films in which the ghostly presence of Chinese migrants is central: China appears as a desirable alternative for overcoming aging, illness, and mortality, while traditional medical practice is transformed into a monstrous invasion and occupation.¹³ An allegorical reading in the trade press goes further, taking the condemned building as the island of Hong Kong and the doctor and his wife as Mainlanders distraught at a Westernized Hong Kong that cannot remember the power of tradition.³

Sequel and afterlife

The anthology's success led Chan to produce a sequel, Three... Extremes (San Geng 2, 2004), with segments from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan.⁷ In the sequel's Hong Kong segment, Dumplings (dir. Fruit Chan), the necrophilia motif of Going Home is replaced with cannibalism, extending the earlier theme of resisting change into a more complicated interrogation of the cause and effect of ineluctable change.⁷ Because horror films, especially ghost themes, are blocked from the socialist, atheist Mainland market by censors, the genre continued to seek its space in the Asian market through pan-Asian cooperation.⁷ Critics reviewing the anthology consistently single out "Going Home" as its strongest segment, the one that manages to tell a story rather than merely explore a theme or style.^{17 • 6}