The Last Dance

Released 2024. Director: Anselm Chan

THE TITLE REFERS TO A RITUAL at Taoist funerals known as “breaking hell’s gates”, performed to transcend the soul of the deceased. In this layered and earnest drama from Hong Kong, it’s the living left behind who desperately need a benign passage to reconcile with each other.

The Last Dance is about beliefs and rituals, tradition and prejudice. It’s about a family with complicated emotions and dormant issues unaddressed. The movie deals with conflicts on several fronts but it has warmth, humour and might even wring a tear at the end if you let your guard down. No surprise that this audience-friendly drama must have struck a chord with its home audience and became Hong Kong’s highest grossing film of 2024.

The Taoist priest’s name is Kwok Man, an elderly man whose religious beliefs dictate every aspect of his life. His son Ben is his reluctant deputy and successor apparent because this line of spiritual vocation is only passed down to male descendants. His daughter Yuet is a sullen but highly capable paramedic. Between them, the family deals with matters of death almost on a daily basis.

The movie is seen, however, from the perspective of an outsider named Dom. Going broke as a wedding planner in the aftermath of COVID, Dom is introduced to Man by his girlfriend's uncle to become his funeral home’s new partner. Dom will manage the business while Man continues to handle the religious rites. The two men start off on the wrong foot – Dom’s new ideas clash with Man’s traditional approach; the new guy also redecorates the office and throws out the priest’s favourite chair, a gift from his late wife. Dom is a pleasant guy and tries his best to gain the approval of the elderly spiritual leader, but his misguided generosity, though genuine, often exacerbates the relationship, such as the time when he shows up at the Kwok residence for dinner with roast pork, never realising that the priest is vegetarian. Dom persists as a novice despite Man being dismissive.

There is quite a lot going on besides the uneasy partnership between the two principal characters and their opposing approaches to people, business and life. At his wife’s urging, Ben converts to Catholicism to boost his son’s chance of enrolment at a private school and eventually migrates his family to Australia. Yuet has an affair with a married co-worker and a rather sweet daughter-mother relationship with an old lady who owns a small eatery. Man’s ongoing friction with Yuet worsens and their open hostility escalates. Entrenched in the past, Man deals with the dead with blinkered vision, neglecting the living, including his own family. His chauvinistic belief that women are “filthy” because of menstruation and are inherently inferior has led to years of psychological harm to Yuet. Even when he’s become immobile after a stroke the old man resists help from his own daughter. As for Dom, in addition to dealing with a cranky old-timer at work he has to reckon with his resistance to becoming a parent when he finds out his girlfriend is pregnant.

All these secondary plot lines appear to intrude on the central narrative and the movie feels busy as you try to keep track of the various developments. In the end though, they coalesce into the main theme of family and kindness.

A contrast is also drawn between Man’s ironclad processes and Dom’s sensitivity towards the next of kin. In the early days Dom steps into the business with profits as the priority, promoting merchandising and add-on services to grieving families to squeeze a few more bucks, much to Man’s disapproval. In time Dom develops genuine sympathy for his clients, bending rules and accommodating unusual wishes because it’s the decent thing to do in a time of grief. The strict priest would never have altered any of his rules regardless of human emotions.

For a movie replete with rituals and symbolic meaning, it’s the human element behind the acts that ultimately brings home its message of compassion and reconciliation. The principal cast of Dayo Wong, Michelle Wai, Pak-Hong Chu and screen veteran Michael Hui bring their heartfelt performances to a poignant conclusion that’s foreseeable but also affecting in a melodramatic way.    

Click image above to view trailer. New window will open.