Cult star Anthony Wong is the centerpiece of this refreshingly brutal character study/ crime comedy-drama/ horror film. There is much artistic integrity to be found in Herman Yau’s direction, which pulls no punches in its depiction of the violent crimes of Wong’s Mahjong-cheating sociopath. Unfortunately, a sizable amount of the film is devoted to the bizarre comedy of the police officers investigating both Wong (also his character’s name) and potentially related crimes. Although often cleverly satirical in itself, this humor involving the concurrent harassment of a female officer by her male counterparts and their leering at their superior’s several prostitute companions does not belong in this film. This aspect of the film, in fact, turns out to be completely pointless, especially since it has no context or even any semblance of relevance to the primary story.

The latter, on the other hand, plays out with such straightforward and unflinching realism that both the visceral and cerebral impacts of its carefully drawn scenes remain vividly present in the consciousness after viewing the film. Wong’s Wong is a character so flawlessly conceived and illustrated that it is a ponderous mistake no to devote more of the film to him. As for the interactions of Wong with the officers, the shenanigans of the latter become a moot point; the outrageous hilarity of a scene in which the officers gluttonously devour Wong’s gift of “barbecue” meat buns is somewhat of a non sequitur with regards to their earlier actions. Thus, we get the impression that their main purpose in the film is simply to supply comic relief, however random and inconsistent with their characters. On the other hand, the officers’ apparently egregiously illegal interrogation methods to extract “the untold story” from Wong make a credible statement about humanity in terms of their and Wong’s characters’ fundamentalist natures. There is no omniscient moralizing here; we only witness what happens without being told how to digest it.

In this mostly enjoyable and occasionally grisly docudrama, we follow the officers, doctors, soldiers, youth corps, and inmates of a Japanese prison camp through their final desperate days of World War II. Set in the isolated tundra of occupied Manchuria, a handful of Japanese brass is commissioned to heartlessly perform experiments on the captured Chinese, Korean, and Russian prisoners. The Japanese, in a last ditch effort to defeat the Allies, have concluded that the best way to do so is via chemical, bacterial, and biological warfare; hence, the experiments. They distance themselves from their victims by referring to them as “maruta,” or material, and by imposing this viewpoint on the protagonistic youth corps, who reluctantly, with increasing disillusionment, accept their roles in what they believed would be an adventurous situation. The commanding Lieutenant General is nearly fanatic in his work, and his subordinates somewhat abate his zeal with their pragmatism; the combination leads to a rather disturbing final twist.

The dynamics of the youth corps, however, are the most interesting aspect of the film, as this is its focal point. What makes this film most memorable, though, are the gruesome and almost totally unexpected moments of shocking violence that underscore the arbitrary and apparently unproductive nature of the experiments. The victims’ sense of despair in the unapologetic face of the Japanese is sincerely felt, as is the mounting suspense of a third-act subplot which eventually comes to the forefront. Despite moments of tonal ambiguity that belie the psychological depths of some characters and of the film as a whole, this film remains a quietly stunning dramatization of real-life horror.