Small Hours of the Night

A telephone, an ashtray, a tape recorder, a rough corner of the wall – these are among the only objects we see in the opening movement of Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui’s austere chamber drama Small Hours of the Night. A woman is being interrogated in a dark room by a stern young man on a rainy night. As the hours pass, identities and historical time periods begin to blur. Her testimony becomes a scrambled, personal record of her country’s complicated legal history.

Hui’s film represents a rare political work from Singapore, one that tackles the city state’s iron-fisted policy towards dissent head on. The main character, who is an amalgam of various real-life defendants from Singapore’s history, becomes a subject beneath the Law, standing for all those whose fates were at the mercy of the courts.

With its hypnotic chiaroscuro cinematography and fastidious sound design, Small Hours of the Night works up a meditative intensity that transforms a police interrogation into something resembling a metaphysical trial. The result is a slow-burning, symbolic psychodrama about a civilian at the receiving end of an all-powerful judicial system that is capable of defining public morality.

– Srikanth Srinivasan