A Man Trembles
2021 · 22m · Singapore
Directed by Mark Chua, Lam Li Shuen
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
In 1998 Singapore, at the peak of the Asian Financial Crisis, a man and his family spend their final day on Earth at Sentosa island, where he confronts the peculiar closeness between salvation and terror.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a gut-punch about apocalypse and intimacy, but it plays it too straight—a family's last day reads like a solemn essay when it could've been genuinely strange, genuinely wrong.
Chua and Shuen situate themselves precisely in the lineage of contemplative cinema responding to historical rupture (Park Chan-wook's early work, the restraint of slow cinema), and their formal control—the pacing, the way they let silence do the heavy lifting around financial collapse—feels earned and deliberate.
The decision to ground the apocalyptic weight in Sentosa's specific geography, letting the island's leisure infrastructure become a crucible for familial tenderness, does more work than the premise alone could; that spatial choice is what makes the melancholy actually land.