23-year-old Tuck (Tien-you Chui) inhabits a run-down hut in semi-rural Malaysia with his doting but alcoholic mother (Kara Hui). Suffocating under her thumb (as you can see above, she even still cuts his hair), he pursues a romance with the consenting but underage Ying (Ng Meng-Hui), sparking a dispute with their families as her parents threaten to report him to the police. This and Tuck's rather simple nature gets him in even more strife when he's seen hanging out at a local forest where another teenage girl was recently raped and murdered. Although he was obviously just in the wrong place at the wrong time, he's now a prime suspect, especially as his relationship with Ying has already been reported. Now, along with controlling some emotional demons, Tuck must clear his name - with Mumsey's help, of course (whether he wants that or not).
I love how foreign-language cinema can offer a refreshing, juxtaposed insight into another culture, and At the End of Daybreak does this very well. It also marries two disparate kinds of dramas (crime and family) with real assurance to make one very unique by Hollywood's standards. It's also very carefully plotted, and writer-director YuHang Ho employs lush photography and a low-key soundtrack to make the mood all the more atmospheric. Chui makes a personable protagonist, giving Tuck flickers of self-confusion and insecurity to help explain some of his less favourable behaviour, particularly towards his mum, to whom Hui brings a nice sort of passive-aggressive, duplicitous authority, and Meng-Hui is sweetly affecting as Ying.
At the End of Dayybreak seeks to be a relationship study, a police procedural and even a portrait of past and present-day Malaysia. That's a strange trio to juggle and combine, but somehow it pulls that off.
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