Winner of the top prize at Locarno in 2018, Singaporean filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature is a dreamy, fluidly shaped neo-noir about a detective investigating the whereabouts of a missing Chinese migrant worker. It being far from a straight forward mystery, we shift between the perspective of the cop and the laborer, seem to move in and out of each of their dreams, and our sense of the timeline is slippery.
Its effect is slightly uneven. There are mesmerizing sequences, such as when we’re taken inside the first-person-shooter computer game that the laborer plays each night at a neon-lit Internet cafe, and he speaks somnambulantly in voiceover as we drift around a digital desert compound. The mood is also often quite compelling, such as when the laborer...