The police procedural story can be a pretty tired genre.  It’s brought to life when the procedures themselves are unfamiliar.  Which is where Lau Ching Wan scores as Officer Bun, asking a subordinate to put him into a suitcase and throw him down the stairs.  He tumbles down, emerging battered from the luggage, and announces that the killer is the man who owns the ice-cream parlour.  Result.

As with ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s Violent Cop, there’s something pretty on-the-nose about the title of Mad Detective.  It’s made by Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai, the team behind a host of leftfield Hong Kong hits in recent years, and the titular detective spends most of the film with a bandage around his head in case you were wondering the nature of his problem.

My interest in the film is partly because I’m slowly exploring the world of Asian cinema.  Also, I’m working on a screenplay about a cop undergoing a psychotic episode.  One aspect of the film I liked was that you’re not really sure about what’s made Bun mad.  Oh, there are clues in the presence of his ex wife, who only he can see, but there’s no implication that one moment with her led to Bun’s insanity.  It doesn’t work like that: didn’t at any rate for me with my bipolarity, and it’s refreshing to see a film that doesn’t do simplistic theorising about mental health.

Instead, the film pulls you into Bun’s madness from his own perspective.  Ask Bun, and he’ll tell you that he sees the inner selves of people around him.  That claim to special insight is not unusual in cases of mental illness.  Careful cutting between Bun’s worldview, which includes people only he sees, and what onlookers notice, allows glimpses into the realms of the protagonist’s interior world.  Maybe not rocket science in an era of Charlie Kaufman’s and Michel Gondry’s glorious conceits, but a great way to bring Mad Detective to life.

The plot, concocted by screenwriters Wai Ko Fau and Au Kin Yee, is relatively complex, involving the disappearance of a detective and the use of his gun in a series of violent robberies.  Bun, removed from the police force since he severed off one of his ears to present to a retiring officer, is consulted by a young cop, Ho, who looks up to him and wants to emulate his eccentric methods.  Only, lacking Bun’s off-beam perceptions, Ho doesn’t get much out of being buried in the forest where the missing cop was last seen.

What makes Mad Detective special is its visual flair, some amazing images being realised in alignment with the film’s narrative rather than self-indulgently.  Seven people whistling nonchalantly as they strut down the street, each facets of the antagonist’s character.  A spray of water that Bun interprets as a good omen.  And a showdown in a warehouse full of window frames, potted plants reflected in them to echo the forest where the antagonist and his partner first disappeared.

Is it a good representation of mental illness?  I’m not sure that Mad Detective or any other film is obliged to shoulder that burden.  Coveying the subjectivity of psychosis through making the images and voices perceived by its sufferer visible and audible to the audience is a highly effective means of making the condition live on screen, and make people aware how near and at the same time far it is from normal states of consciousness.

Mad Detective is interesting enough that a remake to remove its distinctness is perhaps inevitable.  If we’re lucky, it’ll be of the same calibre as Scorsese’s reinvention of Infernal Affairs as The Departed.  More likely, it’ll become yet another forgettable cover version, like the ones that have been made of any number of Japanese horror films.