Director Chai Yee Wei's fourth local film shows off actor Mark Lee's vulnerable side.
Mark Lee and Peter Yu in Wonderland, a film which takes a deep dive into the inner lives of its characters.It is the 1980s and incense shop owner and single parent Loke sells his kampung home to pay for his daughter Eileen’s education in New York. After moving into a small flat, he finds himself lonely and isolated, haunted by memories of his late wife and the good times they shared at the Wonderland Amusement Park in Kallang.
Character motivations are clear and easy to follow. This material is middlebrow, in the best sense of the word. Yu’s Tan, for example, is offered a measure of redemption, one that will give his story a typically pleasant conclusion. Instead, the film offers him an open-ended journey. Much has been said about how almost every line of dialogue here is in Hokkien, a rarity in Singapore’s dialect-averse entertainment scene. As uttered by Lee and Yu, the language sounds gentle and musical. It is a novelty for only a few minutes before one forgets about it to focus on the story.
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