We’re Nothing At All

Audience Choice Award, 2026 Hong Kong International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival

With over 80 films to his name from blockbusters to Category III gore, even fans of mercurial Hong Kong master Herman Yau may be shocked. It begins with an operatic double decker bus exploding on Valentine’s Day, with a force so epic the victims become nothing but bits of charcoal. Charred hands remain of two mysteriously unidentified passengers, and ace forensic expert Dragon Lung Sir is called out of retirement to retroactively piece together events.

As Lung (Patrick Tam) slowly rewinds the clock, Yau plays it forward with the fragile romance of Fai and Ike (played by Cantopop stars ANSONBEAN and Anson Kong from Mirror). Social discards, the two hustle to live and love against the slim odds of a Hong Kong lurid with labor strikes, debt collectors, gigolos, bottom-of-the-pyramid jobs, homophobia, and crushing loneliness. As Lung’s past begins to unexpectedly overlap with theirs, Fai and Ike’s desperate reach for a little patch of freedom crumbles under the brutal logic of a world beyond their control.

In one of the most simultaneously unhinged, melodramatic, harrowing portraits of contemporary Hong Kong, Yau frankensteins an explosive police procedural and a doomed gay romance gasping for air on the floor of Hong Kong’s disappearing wet markets. Inspired by a true story, Yau self-financed the film to more freely inject social commentary into queer melodrama without studio tampering or government censorship. In Yau’s world, violence is the symptom, and tragedy isn’t just the struggling lives blown to smithereens but how understandable it has all become.

– Christina Ree