"Wind, Forest, Fire and Volcano", known as the "urban legend of Hong Kong films", suffered a reputation collapse after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival?
At this moment, if you open Douban, the latest short reviews for "Wind, Forest, Fire and Volcano" are basically negative reviews, but before May 16, 2025, most of the comments under this entry were from netizens saying "I want to watch it".
If you change the film's English name to "Sons of the Neon Night" and search on X, Facebook, and TikTok, you will basically see all negative reviews in various languages.
Poster of "Wind, Forest, Fire and Mountain"
What happened to this movie that is said to have taken Hong Kong director Junlong Mak eight years of hard work?
The filming started in May 2017 and was completed in March 2018. It cost HK$400 million to restore the real scene of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong 1:1. The film was postponed many times and is finally scheduled to premiere in the "Midnight Screening Unit" of the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 2025. The film is the only Chinese-language film shortlisted for this unit at this year's Cannes.
The collapse of word-of-mouth occurred 132 minutes after the film was played that night. This sudden reversal of word-of-mouth was very similar to last year's "The Sauce Garden", when director Peter Chan's new film premiered in Cannes but received poor word of mouth and there has been no accurate news about its release to date.
Director of "Wind, Forest, Fire and Volcano" Juno Mak (left) and starring Gao Yuanyuan, Louis Koo and Tony Leung Ka Fai on the red carpet in Cannes
The most representative post-screening review of "Wind, Forest, Fire and Volcano" was from the Cannes program "ScreenDaily": "The original rough cut of the film was nearly 7 hours long, but the version now screened lacks a lot of emotional and narrative clues, making it difficult for the audience to immerse themselves in the viewing process. It ultimately presents a strange movie, but it may be an excellent mini-series."
It is reported that there are multiple versions of "Wind, Forest, Fire and Mountain", including but not limited to the 2-hour theatrical version, the 3-hour director's cut version and the unpublished 6-hour full version. As Takeshi Kaneshiro refused to reshoot after his contract expired, some shots in the film were completed by AI technology.
The poster of "Wind, Forest, Fire and Volcano" at the Cannes International Market featured Takeshi Kaneshiro, but the leading actor of the film did not go. In addition, Lau Ching-Wan also did not go to Cannes, but the reason given by Lau Ching-Wan was that he had an eye disease and needed surgery.
However, many Chinese and foreign professional audiences who watched the film in Cannes believed that the problem with the film was not the length, but the film's inability to strike a balance between art and commerce, the slow pace, and some obscure plots. The film's public story synopsis is: It begins with the death of a Hong Kong tycoon in an explosion, revealing the conspiracy of Cui Sinian (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the heir of a drug trafficking group, to create social chaos in the name of "creating a drug-free world." The story uses nested narratives to show power struggles, family conspiracies, and human struggles, and integrates visual symbols such as "snow covering the city" and "children of the neon night" to metaphorically represent the collapse of order and urban alienation.
According to the film company, "Wind, Forest, Fire and Mountain" is expected to be released in mainland China. According to the audience who watched the film at the Cannes Film Festival, the film has been "dragon-marked". After the official release, the audience can personally experience whether the film, which Director Mai worked so hard on and star Tony Leung Ka Fai recommended to watch several times, is as bad as the audience criticized at the Cannes premiere.
