The Untold Story

Here’s a film that dares you to keep watching. Based on a real 1985 murder case in Macau, The Untold Story opens with a bag of severed limbs washing ashore, leading police to the Eight Immortals Restaurant and its unhinged proprietor Wong, played with chilling intensity by Anthony Wong.

Director Herman Yau has crafted something genuinely unsettling—not through cheap scares, but through jarring tonal whiplash that keeps you off-balance. One moment we’re watching a goofy comedy with bumbling cops and a captain who shows up to each scene with a different scantily-clad woman. The next, we’re witnessing Anthony Wong’s brutal assaults that made my skin crawl.

This isn’t filmmaking ineptitude. It’s calculated discomfort. The comedy prevents the violence from becoming numbing, while the violence makes the comedy feel obscene.

Wong disappears into his role completely. With his buzz cut and thick glasses, he looks like an accountant. He acts like a monster. His eyes dart constantly. Rage perpetually simmers beneath his mild exterior, ready to boil over in an instant. You sense he’s never known a moment of peace or contentment.

Yau constructs his horror through masterful restraint. In one sequence, Yau follows a victim’s ascent to a table with his camera, then tilts up to show Wong looming overhead with a cleaver. The cleaver drops, the table shudders, blood jets over the edge. A head rolls to the floor. We never see the blow, but Yau has forced us to visualize it, and our minds are crueler than cameras.

The third act confession sequence, depicting the murder of an entire family including small children, pushed me to my limit. Yau refuses to look away, forcing us to confront violence in all its senseless brutality. It’s expertly crafted filmmaking that I found genuinely unpleasant to experience.

Indeed, for me, The Untold Story proves easier to admire than enjoy. Yau and Wong would later collaborate on Ebola Syndrome, which maintains similar violence but adds pitch-black comedy throughout—a more palatable approach for my taste.

This film demands something from its audience that many won’t want to give. It’s uncompromising, skillfully made, and deeply uncomfortable. Whether that’s recommendation or warning depends entirely on you.