The film stars Josie Ho as a young woman who dreams of living in a luxurious condo with a view. Because the story is told out of chronological order, we know early on that at some point in the narrative she becomes a ruthless killer. We just don't know exactly how or why.
Inbetween murder sessions and scenes of Ho's unsatisfying love life and jobs, we get flashbacks showing how her family was forcibly moved by a crooked government when she was a child, how her mother died before she could make good on a promise to get them a nice place, and how her father eventually became ill and the medical bills skyrocketed.
The nice thing about this set up is it has a little commentary about the state of the world today, or more specifically, the state of the world on the eve of the housing crisis and recession. It's an interesting idea, showing a young woman struggling to earn enough money to achieve her dreams against a backdrop of an unstable and always-changing economy. It's one of the few movies I've seen that deals honestly with the giant gap between what people expect to get as they grow up (a home, a family, security) and what they can actually afford (basically nothing worth while). It is believable that this conundrum might drive someone to a desperate act, or even a cold and calculated unethical act.
Unfortunately the acts shown in this movie are so over the top, so gory and so unrelenting that I had a hard time believing Ho's character would come to this. Murder is probably messy and unwieldy, sure, and I respect the movie for making it clear that it is not easy for Ho to go on a killing spree. However, after the first grueling murder, you'd think she'd throw in the towel, rather than continuing on a spree for the rest of the night, with multiple victims including a young pregnant woman. We get glimpses into some of these lives before they are destroyed, but they are rarely sympathetic and usually satirical views of the privileged class. So is Ho a kind of anti-hero for viciously killing them? I don't think so.
But even if this was the point of the movie, and even if it worked, I'd still have a hard time believing the hard ships she went through in her life led to this kind of cold blooded savagery. Yes, I realize similar things happen to real people in real life, but this is so extreme that it is a little hard to swallow. The movie betrays its own premise by making Ho such an extreme killer. Maybe if they backed off the gore a little, simplified the murder spree, stretched it out over a period of time, anything to make it more believable, then they'd really have a chilling point.
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