By Simon Abrams

Mad Detective
Directed by Johnny To


Mad Detective, Johhny To’s latest collaboration with screenwriter/director Ka-fai Wai is just as cerebral and meaty as the pair’s last project, Running On Karma (2003), an action-comedy that had something for everybody. Karma had romance, humor, kung fu, motorcycle chases, a Taoist plea for peace, time travel, Sikhs hiding in small tin cans and, most importantly, Andy Lau in a muscle suit. Four years later, Wai and To’s Mad Detective continues to push the limits of their viewers’ sanity with more brilliant images and ideas than you can process all in one sitting.

Though there’s a myriad of self-contradicting ideas floating around in Detective, determining what’s true and what’s not is the most exhilarating part of the film. Bun (Ching Wan Lau), our titular schizophrenic cop, thinks at a million miles a minute, and the audience has to try to keep up with him. Wai’s script hits the ground running, dragging the viewer along through a hall of mirrors filled with a killer’s multiple personalities, mundane phantasms, missing guns and masked shooters.

By the time we get to the panoramic climax, we’re as lost as Bun’s partner, Inspector Ho (Andy On), but not for want of trying. Like the audience, he desperately wants to keep up with Bun but just can’t decipher the fleeting hieroglyphics that only he can see. Bun may be a genius—he’s a self-mutilating psychic that dines with his wife’s ghost every night— but when it’s revealed that she’s not really dead, his methods look a lot like madness.

Still, as Bun sagaciously suggests, one should “Apply emotions to investigate,” not facts. It may make no sense to throw logic out the window, but that’s exactly what makes Detective such an unhinged blast.