12 Storeys

The benign spirit of Kieslowski hovers over Khoo's second feature, which picks up where Mee Pok Man left off with more funny/sad accounts of screwed-up lives in a typical Singaporean government-housing block. Khoo focuses on the inhabitants of three apartments: an overweight single woman who can't get her late mother's cruel nagging out of her head, a working-class slob put through the mill by his brought-from-China wife, and a very uptight guy who crashes into the discovery that his younger sister has a sex life. As a social satire of Lee Kuan-Yew's nanny state, this is witty and sophisticated stuff. As an anthology of lives blighted by self-delusion and peer-group pressure, it's so truthful it hurts.