Monsoon Blue
2023 · 14m · Hong Kong
Directed by Jay Hiukit Wong, Ellis Kayin Chan
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In a crumbling Hong Kong pet fish shop, Summer, a woman suffocating under forgotten dreams, works among bagged goldfish; when the monsoon arrives, suppressed memories flood back in a story of memory, identity and metamorphosis.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Wong and Chan do the thing everyone expects from Hong Kong cinema—melancholy + magical realism + memory—and execute it competently, which is exactly why it doesn't stick the landing; the monsoon metaphor is doing all the heavy lifting while the film itself plays it safe.
The precision here is architectural: how the pet shop's cramped geometry mirrors psychological confinement, how the monsoon sequence functions as both literal weather and Proustian trigger, situating itself squarely in the lineage of Wong Kar-wai's colour-memory work while earning its own formal restraint.
There's a single decision—the choice to keep Summer's face obscured or fragmented during the memory sequences rather than granting us clear access—that transforms what could've been straightforward magical realism into something genuinely disorienting and earned.