Advertisement

Review | Love Lies movie review: Sandra Ng, Michael Cheung in online dating scam comedy drama

Ng plays an emotionally stunted doctor who falls prey to an online dating scam in a film with a profound message hidden beneath its comedy

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Sandra Ng as doctor Veronica Yu and Michael Cheung as scam artist Joe Lee in a still from Love Lies (category I; Cantonese), directed by Ho Miu-ki.

3/5 stars

Advertisement

An online dating scam takes on a life of its own in Love Lies, a fitfully melancholy, often amusing look at romance, deception and human nature that draws us in with its thought-provoking premise but struggles to realise the full potential of its ingenious set-up.

Sandra Ng Kwan-yue gives her most nuanced performance in years – certainly more so than her celebrated turn in Zero to Hero – as Veronica Yu, a successful gynaecologist whose private life has been a mess; she was in an emotionally stunted state even before her husband (Emotion Cheung Kam-ching) died suddenly years earlier.

When we first meet her, Yu is being questioned by police as a fraud victim. Curiously, she refuses to press charges despite having lost a huge sum of money, instead insisting that she has fully enjoyed her virtual romance with a middle-aged French engineer and widower she met on a dating app.

《我談的那場戀愛》終極預告嚟啦!9.12 信者可愛
On the flip side of the con, and being questioned in the next room, is Joe Lee (singer “MC” Michael Cheung Tin-fu, One Night at School), newly recruited by a dating scam syndicate led by Chan Fai-hung’s mastermind and Stephy Tang Lai-yan’s flirty strategist. Lee may be the one who has called the police on them.
Advertisement
Advertisement