Favouring quite a heavy amount of style, using askew angles and initially very long takes of narrative action, director Chiang settles down soon with Yuen's script and delivers partly familiar cop procedure, character drama that parallels past trauma etc etc. The Dream Killer doesn't get buried in its clichés at all though and the screenplay is quite well-structured and intelligent. Featuring understated, possible romantic interludes between leads Cheng and Chow, more interesting tangents flash by such as victims not wishing to come forward for risk of losing face and the intimidation men have of clever women. Mark Cheng comes through with a somewhat rare, charismatic performance, despite the arc of the troubled cop while Valerie Chow may have solely the writing to back her up but is a fine presence nonetheless. Playing with notions of thunderstorms always going on during tense sequences and not truly surprising when revealing the killer identity, Chiang still doesn't cancel out his finely laid out work by the end. Heck, he even gets audience acceptance when structuring the character codas in an ambiguous way. Michael Wong's dubber has chosen to mix Chinese and English as well (!) and Alex Fong also appears.