Mad Fate (2023)
Directed by Soi Cheang
Screenplay by Melvin Li & Nai-Hoi Yau
Starring Lok Man Yeung, Gordon Lam, Charm Man Chan, Ting Yip Ng, Wing-Sze Ng, Ching Yan Birdy Wong, Man-Wai Wong, Pancy Chan, & Oscar Guo.

Mystery / Thriller

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS!
If you proceed,
you choose your
own fate.

There are plenty of movies about fate amongst every genre and not a single one of them are like Soi Cheang’s Mad Fate, a singular vision of the madness that ideas concerning fate can provoke. A seer called The Master (Gordon Lam) meets a supposed born psychopath, Siu Tung (Lok Man Yeung), after they both witness a serial killer (Charm Man Chan) fleeing the scene of a sex worker’s vicious murder. The Master, believing he can change fate, tries to help Siu Tung not kill. The pair are thrust together by fate and go on to try defying it, together or not. All the while, a detective (Ting Yip Ng) who’s known Siu Tung since the psycho was a boy is on the trail, the serial killer’s still out there killing, and fate’s puppet strings go on being pulled by the cosmos. Can anybody really change fate? Or are we all doomed to follow its path, regardless of its wreckage?

In Mad Fate, all sorts of things fall into the category of fate while coexisting alongside the free will and choices of regular people. Life is a hybrid of fate and free will insofar as our choices are what lead to our fates. There are, in reality, many kinds of fate: social, romantic, mental health, and plenty of other fates. The Master’s story within the film is about having the will to not rely on fate, to make our own choices, to step into the unknown rather than only relying on what we think we know for sure. Mad Fate is a chaotic tale that questions an individual and societal reliance on fate by suggesting that nothing is for certain, especially when it boils down to the things we can hopefully control, if only we can find the strength to do so.
Chinese fortune telling is best known as Suan ming, roughly translating to ‘fate calculating.’ The Master engages with a type of fortune telling called Ziping divination. This is clear when The Master refers to things like “earth branches,” as Ziping divination’s method involves the ‘ten stems’ and ‘twelve branches’ of a person’s birth. He works off natal charts, which we hear as he tells Siu Tung that the latter’s chart “predicted doom” from birth. There’s a commentary about cultural reliance on fate when The Master begins to realise that fate calculation and too deep a reliance on fatalism obscures the fact that we can change things in our lives/society around us. The serial killer’s reign of terror over the city starts to evolve into a wider, more cosmic storm that crackles with lightning above the city, and winds that threaten to sweep everyone away, all while a battle of fates rages throughout the streets below. The storm is always looming over Siu Tung, whose place in the film touches on the way society marks certain people, like those they deem psychopaths, as fated to horrible things. Everyone from Tung’s family to the cops have given up on him because psychopathy, in the realm of science and in the eyes of society, is so often viewed as an unchangeable fate. For a time, The Master subscribes to this view, too.

What haunts The Master most is his family’s history of mental illness, as well as his deep-seated worry that fate is incapable of being changed. This plays out mainly through The Master’s relationship with Siu Tung. The Master winds up building a jail cell for Siu Tung, so the latter can “preemptively accept” the fate he’ll face after inevitably committing murder. Even late in the film he claims: “Going against fate is humanity‘s biggest tragedy.” But eventually, The Master understands that change is possible. He urges Siu Tung to recite “the Great Compassion Mantra” aka “Nīlakaṇṭha Dhāraṇī“ and makes him do other repetitive tasks, as well as meditate, in order to change Tung’s potential murderous fate. When The Master finally starts to recognise that Siu Tung is capable of change, he begins to believe the same for himself and the fate he believes is in store for him thanks to his family’s genes.
In one of Mad Fate‘s last scenes, an ant nearly drowns in a puddle only to escape when the storm’s rain finally ceases. “We‘re merely ants” in the order of the cosmos, which is what The Master begins to accept, though not in a fatalistic sense anymore. He soon recognises that our “path may be set, but we can choose how to walk it.” There are things at work in the universe that we ants will simply never understand; a part of human existence is unknowable. That doesn’t mean we have to accept some idea of fate and believe there’s nothing that can be done about our lives, or about the larger societal constructs around us. We can change if we want to, like Siu Tung, who goes from wanting to murder cats, and maybe people, to wishing a cat “a long life.” Or like The Master, whose situation at the end of the film may not be ideal yet indicates he has accepted his own hereditary mental illness and is accepting there are measures to be taken that can change his life, hopefully for the better. There are fates we suffer in life and there are also paths we choose. We may be ants, but it doesn’t mean we’re fated to be squashed underneath a pair of sneakers or smothered to death by a child’s fallen ice cream cone.