“A fascinating experimental drama that explores several challenging themes.”

The responsibility of a filmmaker is to craft engaging narratives that keep the audience invested, rather than always offering the answers to the questions they pose. Daniel Hui is guided by this principle during the creation of Small Hours of the Night, a fascinating experimental drama that explores several challenging themes. The film is centred on a lengthy conversation being conducted between a man and a woman – but it is soon revealed to be an interrogation, the participants a police officer and a criminal respectively. Over the course of their discussion she pleads her case while he listens attentively, trying to decode her occasionally vague defence. In between these moments the director scatters in various elements that enrich (or perhaps complicate) this evocative narrative. Using his own fascination with Singapore’s criminal justice system, combined with the historical context that sets the foundation for the film, Hui examines the relationship between guilt and innocence as well as freedom and the threat of it being taken away, over the course of this fascinating and often provocative drama.

Small Hours of the Night is not an immediately easy film to categorize, nor decode its underlying meaning. There’s a density to the story that encourages (rather than requires) the viewer to spend some time becoming acclimated to the references that occur throughout the film. It is complex, invigorating filmmaking that stirs thought and promotes a more nuanced understanding of its subject, which may be entirely new to some viewers. Hui is equally adept at both style and substance, which goes a long way in helping develop upon the recurring motifs and their meaning. Narratively, the story is told in fragments – small segments of the broader narrative are introduced, and we eventually can piece them together to see the fascinating tapestry taking form. This is supported by the unsettling collision of images and sounds, which create a discordant depiction of the ambiguous space between the past and present. The stark black-and-white photography evokes a nightmarish scenario, one that is not necessarily scary, but rather cold and clinical and mired in a sense of entrapment. The use of repetition – both visual and aural – creates a sense of neverending dread, leading to the cathartic final moments that conclude this unnerving but poignant film.

The film is constructed as a two-hander, with Irfan Kasban and Yang Yanxuan Vicki playing the interrogator and the subject of his questioning respectively. The characterization of this film is quite unusual – we never fully understand these characters, and we are constantly kept at arm’s length. In deliberately not providing us with much context as to who they are at first, the audience is asked to create our own theories, and even by the end, we aren’t entirely sure of who they are or what they represent. The performances are undeniably subtle, and Hui uses his actors in fascinating and unconventional ways as he explores these bold ideas. A lot of the dialogue takes place through the use of unseen voices – the camera lingering on one character without glancing at the other – so that these people dwell in the shadows for most of the film. It is rare to find both characters occupying the same frame, and a lot of what Yang and Kasban are doing requires reactive acting, where their facial expressions and gestures say just as much, if not more, than the spoken dialogue. Small Hours of the Night is a character study, but one that intentionally refuses to fully define its characters, primarily because they aren’t exclusively based on specific individuals, but rather are representatives of the population on both sides of the legal divide.

Despite its clear historical context (which impels the viewer to do their external research into Singapore’s past), Small Hours of the Night is a film that keeps the details quite vague. In choosing to craft a story that could be set anywhere at any point in time, whether past, present or future, Hui manages to make some profound statements on not only the legal system, but also the human condition as a whole. The style is striking, with the lack of colour, jagged angles and overemphasis on shadows creating a bleak and uncompromising visual landscape. This is supported by the specific use of sound, often occurring with a distinct rhythm that emphasizes the beauty of banality and the cyclical nature of everyday routine, which becomes a secondary theme as we spend time with these characters over the course of one endless night. Hui evokes a distilled sense of dread, and crafts a film that does not attempt to gloss over the inherent ambiguities that come packaged with the story, but instead builds on them. Venturing in many different directions, and blurring time periods, Small Hours of the Night is a unique and well-crafted film that offers a vaguely Kafkaesque odyssey, which is filtered through a more contemporary view of paranoia that allows this film to exist at the perfect intersection between the past and the present, explored with tremendous vigour by one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary Asian cinema.