We Are Born Good: A Bitterly Funny Fable of Urban Survival

Hong Kong cinema has long excelled at finding existential weight in the mundane, and Yang Liang-chuan’s debut feature We Are Born Good is a worthy addition to that tradition. The film opens with a small mishap—a takeaway order of dry-fry beef noodles handed to a customer who had in fact ordered Singaporean vermicelli—and spirals into an escalating war of attrition between two isolated souls. What begins as petty revenge gradually strips both characters bare, revealing the quiet desperation beneath their daily routines.

The script, tightly wound and darkly comic, refuses easy sentimentality. It understands that cruelty often stems from exhaustion rather than malice. Through this deceptively simple premise, the film examines the psychological toll of surviving in a post-pandemic city where community has eroded and loneliness is the norm. Its central philosophy is embedded in the title itself: if we are indeed born good, what does prolonged hardship make of us? The film suggests that goodness is not innate but fragile—something that must be actively chosen, particularly when life offers every reason to abandon it.

Chung Suet-ying, fresh from her award-winning turn in The Way We Talk, delivers a tour de force performance as a struggling actress trapped by family debt and emotional neglect. Her portrayal is fierce, brittle and deeply moving, and it may well earn her another Hong Kong Film Award next year. Opposite her, Yeung Wai-lun matches her beat for beat as a weary restaurant owner whose bitterness masks a profound sense of failure. Together they embody the film’s thesis: two underdogs locked in mutual destruction, yet unknowingly offering each other the only genuine human connection they have.

Technically assured, the film benefits from Tu Duu-chih’s nuanced sound design and Wong Hin-yan’s melancholic score, which lend the claustrophobic setting an almost spiritual resonance. The screenplay never moralises; it simply observes, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions about blame, empathy and redemption.

We Are Born Good is not a comforting film. It is, however, an honest one—a mirror held up to a society that too often leaves its most vulnerable to fight alone. In its unflinching portrayal of two people at breaking point, it finds something unexpectedly profound: the possibility of grace, however fleeting, in the unlikeliest of places.

Elven Ho