Dog Day Evening (2026) was released nationwide immediately after its premiere at the Shanghai International Film Festival’s Asian New Talent section. It is director Mak Tin Shu’s directorial debut. Although a “new talent” as a director, Mak was not really new or fresh to the Hong Kong film industry. His scripts for Trivisa (2016) and Detective vs. Sleuths (2022) won him two Hong Kong Film Awards. His recent works such as Warriors of Future (2022) and Cesium Fallout (2024) demonstrate his ability to write large-scale, action-packed blockbusters. In this debut work, Mak sets the drama in an enclosed customer service centre of a TV network, and the film almost feels like a stage play with limited locales and a limited cast.

The English title references Sidney Lumet’s classic heist film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), in which Al Pacino plays Sonny, a first-time bank robber driven by desperation whose simple plan spirals out of control. Taking place in the evening, Takky (Yukki Tai) is driven to the wall because of the excruciating failure of cancelling the contract his grandmother signed with the TV network, and takes hostage nine customers with a gun. All the hustle for a minimal matter sounds absurd, but unfortunately it is inspired by a real-life incident in 2014, when a 19-year-old, dissatisfied with still being pursued for outstanding payments after his mother’s cable TV contract was terminated, stormed into the TV building with weapons.

The captives in the room are also victims who have trouble terminating their contracts. They empathise with Takky’s frustration and, ironically, end up helping their captor negotiate with the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the television network. The film turns the absurdity of corporate bureaucracy into a dark comedy; the endless hold music, robotic corporate responses, and buck-passing executives successfully make the audience laugh out loud.

Shedding away the surface of the comedy, the film looks into the relationship between customers and the employees who provide the service. Workers in the corporate world, when they are sick of accommodating bad-tempered customers, slowly lose their humanity and become components of a big machine. The workers turn them against the common people, but what actually contributes to the standoff is the profit-driven corporate structure, which, in order to maintain profit, puts pressure and trouble on both the customers and the employees. Yet they are all just ordinary people, trying to live their lives as well as they can. The power turns people against themselves, wearing off a tiny bit of positivity every day through seemingly trivial matters, but the accumulating frustration erupts like Takky. 

The centre of the absurdist comedy is still a tragedy. The motivation for terminating the contract is driven by an ordinary person’s wish to end a service they no longer want. The request should just be an easy task—it should not have taken a whole police force or shed a drop of blood. Everyone in this world seems to work to their own agenda: employees follow regulations, police follow procedures, journalists chase viewership, bosses boost stock prices. Everyone has their own reason, but what is neglected that causes the tragedy? Perhaps it’s about things outside of oneself. 

One of the best comic reliefs lies in the police officer, Shan, played by Rachel Leung Yung-ting. Having just wrapped the stage performance of her roles as Roderigo, Brabantio and Emilia in a Cantonese adaptation of Othello in the same month, Leung maintains the same heightened energy in playing the hot-tempered and foul-mouthed police director on screen. Director Mak writes this character with Johnnie To in mind, because he is the person he knows who has the strongest presence, who works efficiently and curses with no filter.

The Chinese title,一個部門的誕生 (The Birth of a Department), is a direct homage to 一個字頭的誕生(Too Many Ways to Be No. 1), the 1997 film that officially launched Milkyway Image, the production company founded by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai. Mak is a key figure of Milkyway, and this film displays Milkyway DNA like the signature blend of pitch-black humor, fatalism, sudden bursts of violence, and the overarching theme of characters caught in situations completely beyond their control. By referencing their inaugural film, Mak Tin Shu signals that Dog Day Evening operates in this same universe of ironic twists and chaotic irony.

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Written by Jade Wong

Featured image courtesy of SIFF

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