Quietly devastating-a clear-eyed analysis of the blockages that people erect between each other and within themselves. An out-of-work kid and his parents live together-but-apart in the same shabby apartment. The boy is talked into working as an extra by movie director Ann Hui: he plays a corpse floating in the filthy Tanshui River, and the experience leaves him with a crippling pain in his neck. Father makes regular forays into the city's gay saunas, Mother tries to console herself with an apathetic lover; the boy's mysterious illness is the calamity that powers the narrative. Beckett would have recognized the dissection of solipsistic worlds and obsessional quirks, but Tsai's brilliant stroke is to anchor his sense of the absurd in recognizable social realities. From the director of Rebels of the Neon God and Vive L'amour.-Tony Rayns