Intruder		Return to Review Archive - I
	Year:	1997	Wu Chien-Lien
	Director:	Tsang Kan-Cheong
	Producer:	Johnnie To Kei-Fung, Wai Ka-Fai
	Cast:	Wu Chien-Lien, Lai Yiu-Cheung, Moses Chan Ho, Wong Man-Wai, Yuen Bun
	The Skinny:	Dark, disturbing, yet compelling thriller with Wu Chien-Lien in an against-type role.
	Review by Kozo:	Those guys at Milky Way Productions are making gritty genre pictures their specialty. In this intense Category 3 thriller, Wu Chien-Lien abandons her jade girl image for a truly remorseless, evil villain. She plays Yan, a wanted criminal who flees from Taiwan to Hong Kong by killing a prostitute and assuming her identity. Once in HK, she solicits regular john Lai Yiu-Cheung. She proceeds to take him hostage in his own home, and prepares for the arrival of her also-wanted husband (Moses Chan Ho).      This is a gritty, tense thriller that doesn’t provide easy answers. Yan is essentially a reprehensible character, but she does possess one or two small weaknesses, which ultimately prove her undoing. No character is truly sympathetic, which provides for a complexity that’s both disturbing and enthralling in much the same way that The Longest Nite was.      Wu Chien-Lien is very effective in her against-type role. Sometimes you can’t tell what she’ll do next, which adds a considerable amount of tension to the proceedings. This film operates very purely within its genre, but manages to explore all its characters, something which manages to lift the film from exploitation to borderline art. Putting a face on genre is what Milky Way productions has excelled at, and they continue to do so with this worthwhile, if not overly graphic, crime story. (Kozo 1998)
		image courtesy of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society
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