Above & Beyond
Louis Koo, JOnathan li and Chou Man-yu hop on the the relationship drama-as-genre film train to KL.
Behind the Shadows
Directors: Jonathan Li, Chou Man-yu • Writer: Chou Man-yu
Starring: Louis Koo, Liu Kuan-ting, Chrissie Chau, Raymond Wong, Renci Yeung
Hong Kong/Malaysia • 1hr 43mins
Opens Hong Kong June 12 • IIB
Grade: B
We’re all good with the idea of Louis Koo Tin-lok as the perpetually cool guy, right? C’mon, his all-encompassing production house is called One Cool. A bit orange (but not that orange, you know what, let’s call him bronze) and the picture of icy reticence, even when Koo is being goofy and/or loose (and he can, because that finger dangling scene in The White Storm 2: Drug Lords is never going to be not funny) or what passes for a loser (Throw Down) the mini-mogul always gives off an air of detached composure; like he knows what’s going on but you don’t. It’s his brand.
Which makes his vaguely against-type performance in Jonathan Li Tsz-chun and Chou Man-yu’s Behind the Shadows | 私家偵探 such a modest, pleasant surprise. Koo plays Au Yeung Wai-yip, an old school private dick who finds runaway fiancées, cheaters and otherwise missing persons, and never misses a chance to charge his clients double. His cramped office in Kuala Lumpur is smoky, papers are stacked high. He probably has a frosted glass window in his door. Au’s main cases for the week are: a man looking for his missing fiancée; a gangster buddy, Clowy (Raymond Wong Ho-yin) checking up on his boss’s girl, Betty (Renci Yeung Si-wing, Smashing Frank); and another guy also checking up on a girl, his girl – who is Au’s wife Kuan Weng Sam (Chrissie Chau Sau-na). Awkward. While Au is running around looking for these evidently slutty women, a serial murderer is loose in KL, and Chen Heong Men (Liu Kuan-ting, Marry My Dead Body) is the cop looking for him. The dead-eyed, slightly psychotic Chen has a wife in a coma, and strange as it seems all these streams converge by the end of the story.
The happy couple
Check that. The cool thing is only part of Koo’s brand. The other is tirelessly stumping for Hong Kong cinema – and putting his money where his mouth is. Behind the Shadows was produced by Soi Cheang Pou-soi (whose Koo-starring Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In was Hong Kong’s biggest ever box office hit for about six months in 2024) and is the first film to come out of One Cool’s new branch office in KL. It’s part of a more ambitious goal to widen the local industry’s scope – for production, distribution, visibility, sourcing talent… whatever. Koo’s aim is to internationalise and this is a big step. Behind the Shadows is precision engineered to play in multiple markets across the region by its casting – aside from Taiwanese actor Liu, the film features Malaysians Phei Yong, Yumi Wong Sze-ki (Once Upon a Lie) and Kwan Tak-fai, and mainland actor Cai Xiangyu (Sakra) – the anonymising of KL as the locatlon because really, this could be any large urban centre between the tropics (plus there’s a detour to Singapore) and its storytelling. The slutty women Au is looking for aren’t that slutty after all, ideal for morally persnickety audiences.
Even with those Marvel-type product demands (I’m talking out my ass here, there’s zero evidence Koo or One Cool made any creative demands), co-directors Li and Chou have come up with an efficient and entertaining detective yarn that’s just subversive enough to keep the cranks engaged. Li and Chou last collaborated on 2023’s underrated crime thriller Dust to Dust, and like they did in that film, they layer the action on top of a more considered story about contemporary relationships, Au’s and Chen’s. Chou’s script (for the record, he co-wrote the mythic, Koo-starring Sons of the Neon Night, which was finally unleashed to the public at Cannes this past May) is less interested in who is or isn’t cheating, or even who the killer is, than on the “whys” of both. At every turn Au and Chen are both forced to consider what’s expected of them as modern men in marriage to modern women, if they’re failing, where they’re failing, and how to fix it.
Behind the Shadows works as well as it does in part thanks to Koo in frustrated Everyman mode – he is not coolly detached this time – and some strong supporting work from Yeung (she’s turning into 2025’s Rachel Leung Yung-ting) and Eddie Cheung Siu-fai as Au’s fellow PI Feeble, a freelancer Au occasionally ropes into doing grunt work for him. Liu’s perpetual thousand-yard stare makes Chen somewhat inscrutable, but his main function is to be the mirror image of Au, and to reflect each’s insecurities and guilt back at the other. The biggest whiff is in not making the most of Chau’s considerable presence and leaning more into messing around with her hot babe persona. It’s a sly middle finger to her image for her to play the Respectable Wife, and reducing her to, mostly, a damsel in distress is a missed opportunity. On the upside DOP Tam Wai-kai makes the most of KL’s imposing urban murk, keeping the players in shadowy corners and visualising all their various secrets in its dark doorways and alleys; KL looks sweaty. Behind the Shadows doesn’t reinvent the detective thriller wheel, but it laces it with a few layers that keep it interesting, zigs a couple times we expect it to zag and ends on an ambiguously cynical note that tips its hat to its detective thriller origins. Cool.