There’s an adage taken from Robert Burns’ 1785 poem “To A Mouse” about how the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry. There’s a similar adage about making god laugh by telling him your plans. There’s Murphy’s Law to muck up the works as well. The simple concept of things going to hell no matter how well you’re prepared is the foundation for Kwok Ka-hei’s blackly hilarious Unidentified Murder, a weird little romp through the world of radio, ufology, and influencer culture.
25 years ago, Mark and Kit were playing in the woods with their friend Ho when, according to the others, Ho was kidnapped by aliens. He was never found, and the two boys enjoy a grim sort of celebrity stemming from the Tung Tau Hill Incident as it came to be known (my fellow UFO buffs: imagine if Travis Walton hadn’t come back and Mike Rogers instead became a strange recluse sought out by people like us). For the upcoming 25th anniversary of the incident, Mark’s girlfriend, influencer Man, decides to prank him by hiring aspiring actor Kim to pose as his long-lost friend Ho. Little does Man know that Mark has plans of his own, all of which spiral out of control as the onion of whose in on what becomes unpeeled over and over again.
This film is an absolute joy to watch. Everything is played with a straight face, giving it a vaguely Coen Bros style of comedy (think Fargo but in Hong Kong and with children and aliens) and the characters reactions to increasingly bizarre and frustrating circumstances are wholly relatable. It’s full of twists and turns, it’s impossible to pin down, and the early variations in tone set the viewer up for how the rest of the film plays out. There are some dark implications to be sure involving child abuse and neglect when Ho’s backstory is explained later on, but the film handles it in such a way that it doesn’t take away from the quirkiness of it all. All the strange plot twists are bound together with a vaguely slapstick sense of absurdity and it never lets up.
Irresistibly charming and utterly engaging, Unidentified Murder is impossible not to love. The constant guessing as to who is in on what and what will happen next doesn’t even come close to getting stale, and the sprinkling of UFO lore and whether or not aliens are actually behind it all make this an absolute delight.
