The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“A bracing and pointedly critical antidote to the male-centered triad youth films of the late 1990s.”

Shelly Kraicer, CineAction

A quartet of defiant girls tussle with the hard knocks of life in Lawrence Lau’s sandpaper portrait of youth in revolt, a veritable Kids by way of post-handover Hong Kong. Set in the arcades, karaoke bars, and junior-high bathrooms of satellite city Tuen Mun, this Category III (i.e. hard R) teen drama follows the chaotic goings-on of a group of disaffected, no-fucks-given middle schoolers. Cookie, the film’s 13-year-old narrator and anchor, has been abandoned by her mother, discarded by her boyfriend, and deprived of a best friend shipped away to reform school. The discovery that she’s pregnant rallies the punk sisterhood around her, and they set off to neon Mong Kok district for an abortion and easy money. Candid in its upfront treatment of sex, drugs, and self-harm, Spacked Out, produced by HK indie kingpin Johnnie To, is a Y2K snapshot of a neglected generation edging dangerously close to self-annihilation.

In Cantonese with English subtitles

“Spacked Out functions as a portrait of the open-circuit temperament of late-’90s Hong Kong.”

Saffron Maeve, Screen Slate

“Lawrence Lau is a national treasure and his movies are social realist Molotov cocktails that set your heart on fire. Spacked Out takes a radical idea—what if the lives of teenaged girls actually mattered?—and drives it hard until it reaches the point where teen angst transforms into near-religious illumination.”

Grady Hendrix, co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival