Simulacrum

Shot in 1996 and first screened in 1999, this bizarre digital feature has picked up an underground reputation, partly because it stars Tony Leung and features a young Maggie Cheung in an extended cameo, and partly because it's so rarely seen. Leung plays a man addicted to a faintly sinister health drink who's hired by a mysterious assassination bureau. His orders to kill arrive in the form of photographs (faces, tattoos), and tracking down the victims takes some time - so long, in fact, that his mind starts to wander and events start taking cyclic turns. This makes little sense as narrative and its digital effects are at best primitive, but its modernist ambitions win it an honourable place in the history of 'alternative' HK cinema. Anyhow, it's a conspiracy theory movie in which all the conspiracies are visual or conceptual.