The Last Dance (2024)

"Dominic" (Dayo Wong) is struggling to make ends meet, post COVID, with his business in tatters and his repayment bills at almost $13,000 per month. He's not afraid of hard work, though, so when his "Uncle Ming" (Paul Chun) offers him his share in a funeral parlour he jumps at the chance. His partner - rather sarcastically referred to as "Hello Man" (Michael Hui) comes across as a rather curmudgeonly fellow - a traditionalist Taoist priest who lives with his ambulance-driving daughter "Yuet" (Michelle Wai) and his favourite son "Ben" (Pak Hon Chu) who is attempting to follow in his father's footsteps. Thing is, in his excitement to get the job done and to make enough money to clear his debts, he makes quite a few schoolboy errors at the start that are way more lively to offend the ancestors than send them peaceably on their way to the next life, and that just irks the older man who feels his new pal is disrespectful. As the story unfolds, we follow a young man who learns a little more about a business that is really anything but. At times this is quite a funny story, with a special appearance by a full-sized, papier-mâché, yellow Maserati rather summing up the ineptness of "Dominic" as he strives for success, but that humour rather quickly evaporates leaving us with a familial drama the can be quite poignant at times as it looks at the restricting roles for women and the hereditary responsibility of sons. Given the professions of the characters, grief is never far away and we focus quiet tenderly at times at just how people come to terms with that - or not, whilst we also try to reconcile just how families themselves change from generation to generation, with some tough decisions having to be made that centre around "Ben" and his need to look forward and not back. The acting is engaging and the dialogue well written, allowing the action to do plenty of the work without subjecting us to a constant surfeit of chatter, and it handles the topic of death and the provisions we make to deal with it and it's aftermath sensitively.