On DVD: "Dream Home"

Pang Ho-Cheung's Marxist home-invasion thriller Dream Home - "based on a true story", the credits inform us, though you take that description with a large pinch of salt - lards a strong central idea with a cleverish structure and a debatable excess of splatter; some will love it, some will most likely be repulsed. What we watch is a young woman (Josie Ho) going on a manic, kill-crazy rampage through the residents of a Hong Kong apartment block, slaughtering adulterers, drug dealers and pregnant women alike.

Utterly reprehensible behaviour, in other words, perhaps mitigated against by the intermittent flashbacks that reveal the killer as a previously meek, put-upon girl working two jobs just to get by. She's never quite forgiven the Government for colluding with Triad gangsters to evict her childhood sweetheart so they could knock his building down and throw up a more expensive one in its place; her current line of attack is - as signalled by an opening title card pointing out how house prices have soared 27% in recent time, while average wages have merely crept up 1% - a reaction to being priced out of the market.

The film's roots lie firmly in exploitation cinema. Someone has his eyeball put out only for another character to stomp on it; a topless, semi-conscious woman has her head put through a lavatory bowl; there's an unspeakable climax to one sex scene. It is, at least, exploitation with a point, its gleeful, generally unchecked malice (that commonly displayed by Takashi Miike before he disappeared off the radar) tempered by a degree of compassion for those of us obliged to listen to reports of mega-companies posting record annual profits while we struggle to maintain a roof above our heads.

We should mention in passing the unexpectedly classy contribution of cinematographer Yu Lik Wai, regular collaborator with Jia Zhang-ke; if he might seem an unlikely choice for this sort of thing, his study of the former colony's remorselessly expanding horizons exerts a certain compulsion in itself. He's wasted whenever the film turns into an episode of Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation, and we don't entirely buy Ho's within-the-hour transformation from wallflower to ruthless avenger, although her slightly clumsy MO allows Ho-Cheung to ratch up a variety of novel ways to puncture his characters' flesh. Messy in most senses, it's nevertheless never backward in setting out its thesis: that for many of us these days, the only way to secure a place of your own is to, one way or another, make a killing.

Dream Home is available on DVD from Monday.