Between 2023 and 2025, Herman Yau churned out seven China–Hong Kong co-productions and mainland Chinese films, including large-scale, action-packed blockbusters like the gritty customs thriller Customs Frontline (2024) and the trilogy capper The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (2023). These films demonstrate Yau’s capacity to produce commercially satisfying spectacles with remarkable speed and energy, but Yau does not slow down. With his latest film, We Are Nothing At All, which had its world premiere at the Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026, he tries something different—something closer to home and to his heart. In this fully self-funded project, Yau appears to bring a greater sense of artistic freedom and expression.

Casting young actors Anson Kong Ip Sang, a member of the Hong Kong boy group Mirror, and singer Anson Chan Ngai-san, known by his stage name ANSONBEAN, brings a refreshed energy to the screen that has been largely absent from Yau’s recent films. Inspired by a real-life incident – the 1998 Wuhan bus bombing – the film follows a gay couple, Ike and Fai, who commit mass murder-suicide by blowing up a double-decker bus on Valentine’s Day. After life takes away their last hope, they decide to be buried with strangers and take vengeance on a society that leaves them no room for survival.

Yau vents his bottled-up anger in this film. He threads his observations of hardship, inequality, and bleakness in Hong Kong society, which has experienced further economic recession after the pandemic, throughout the narrative. In doing so, the protagonists are overwhelmed by a tide of misfortune that Yau constructs around them. At times, the characters feel instrumentalised to represent society, as though their right to simply exist is stripped away. They are instead given a final, desperate determination to counterstrike through death.

From being cast into the darkness of society, the investigation after the explosion becomes a process of tracing back, rediscovering, and revealing their identity and tragedy in daylight. It is understood that Yau is criticising Hong Kong’s image of a seemingly open-minded society, where conservative views on homosexuality persist. What Yau depicts are events that could plausibly occur somewhere in Hong Kong. But it raises the question: Is it still representative and realistic when all the suffering is concentrated almost entirely on the gay couple?

In its more quotidian details, the film reflects Yau’s sharp observation of everyday Hong Kong life from the perspective of an ordinary resident – moments that viewers may find relatable, capturing the often harsh realities witnessed in daily existence. In the final shot, Yau leaves a note on Fai’s subdivided flat door: “When the avalanche comes, no snowflake is innocent.” A more direct version of this idea is Edmund Burke’s line, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Through this phrase and the film’s overflowing anger, Yau seeks to condemn apathy, small compromises, and silent acceptance, urging greater action and less passivity in a society that often smooths over its rough edges. If there had been more kindness extended to Fai and Ike – something that made them feel they were something rather than nothing – things might have taken a different path.

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Written by Jade Wong

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