Accident (2009): Paranoia ensues when a hitman is killed in this taut neo-noir
They specialise in assassinations that look like accidents. Then one of them dies in a seemingly random bus crash. Is there more than meets the eye?
On a small, busy street in Hong Kong, the tire of a woman's car has suffered a puncture. The impatient driver behind her pulls into oncoming traffic to manoeuvre around her stationary vehicle. As he does, a passing truck swerves out of the way and splashes water over his windscreen. Blindly, he mounts the curb where a flag drops from a building onto his car. The driver exits his vehicle and pulls it away. In doing so, the flag dislodges a piece of glass from the building where it was attached. The glass drops down onto the man’s head. It knocks him unconscious. Lying in a pool of his own blood, an ambulance is immediately called by horrified onlookers. However, the broken-down vehicle has caused a build-up of traffic. The paramedics cannot arrive in time, and the man passes away. It’s a dreadful accident. Only it isn’t. The blown tire, the passing truck, the dislodged flag and the falling plane of glass were all orchestrated to simply look like an accident. What actually took place was a carefully planned murder.
In Accident, a taut 80-minute neo-noir produced by Hong Kong legend Johnnie To under his production company Milkyway, Brain (Louis Koo) is the head of a gang of assassins who specialise in contract killings designed to look like accidents. Helping him complete missions like this are characters known only as Fatty (Lam Suet), Woman (Michelle Ye) and Uncle (Stanley Fung). With another successful assignment under their belt, they embark on their next hit: A salaryman has hired the assassins to kill his elderly, wheelchair-bound father in order to claim his life insurance. After studying every movement of their daily routine, the killers devise a meticulous plan. Every night, when the salaryman takes his father for a walk, they cross a tram track. If they were to get his wheelchair onto the third rail, with the right conduit on a rainy evening, they could electrocute their target. Accident is a film as detail-oriented as the killers themselves; director Soi Cheang hones in on every nuance of their scheme as the team formulate and rehearse the murder.
In the second half of Accident, these details become a source of suspicion as the team themselves become the target of what may or may not be an “accident”. After the murder, which is successful but for a forgetful Uncle who fails to perform his role, a bus loses control, almost running over Brain and killing Fatty. It could just be a coincidence, the tragic consequence of rain-soaked streets on a dark night, but Brain knows that in his line of work there is often more than meets the eye. Convinced they were set up, he re-assesses each step of the hit, becoming suspicious of everything and everyone. Is Uncle really senile in his old age, or did he have a role in the crash? And what about the Woman, was she as innocent as she seemed? Or perhaps they were set up by the client himself? The film has shades of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic The Conversation in its all-consuming sense of paranoia, which begins to border on obsession, to the point that Brain’s delusions leave him broken, empty and alone.
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Directed by Soi Cheang. Written by Szeto Kam-Yuen and Nicholl Tang. Produced by Johnnie To. Starring Louis Koo, Michelle Ye, Lam Suet and Stanley Fung. Media Asia Films and Milkyway Image productions. Distributed by Media Asia. 86 minutes. Hong Kong.