Derek Tsang

Derek Tsang's camera stays close and, more often than not, in the hand, and the young women in front of it say less than they feel. He has called empathy the most fundamental requirement of a director, and his films behave as though he meant it: Jing-Pin Yu, the cinematographer who has shot three of them, follows faces rather than events, and the silences are trusted to carry what the dialogue will not. In Better Days (2019), the film about school bullying that made his name, the effect is of a documentary that happens to have a plot.

He did not begin behind the camera. After university in Toronto he went back to Hong Kong and into production at Peter Chan's Applause Pictures, then acted in films from 2003, and his influences were Wong Kar-wai and the French New Wave rather than the mainstream comedy associated with his father. Lover's Discourse (2010) was a co-directed debut; Soul Mate (2016) was his first film alone; Better Days followed three years later. Then in 2021 he was hired to direct the first two episodes of 3 Body Problem (2024) and to co-executive produce it, which is where we came in.

That series is the only work of his we have reviewed, and we gave it 65. Tsang's episodes are the ones that carry the Cultural Revolution material, and the 1960s scenes were, along with the game inside the headset, the part we called superb. We went in braced for eight hours of scientists explaining things to each other and instead spent the opening stretch unsettled, because the past is filmed at close range and without comment, and the dread is left to arrive by itself. The same review found the present-day scientists thin and over-served, and since the first two episodes are where they are introduced, Tsang does not get to walk away from that.

His features shift tone, social drama tipping into thriller inside a single story, with the shift meant to grow out of the material rather than be bolted on, and the producer Jojo Hui has been alongside him for two of them. We have not seen enough of that work to judge it for ourselves, and we would like to; a director who can hold a schoolgirl's face for a minute and then turn the film under her feet is rarer than he should be.

Asked about his style in 2024, Tsang said: "I don't have a concrete and unique style. I'm still learning and evolving." Directors who say that usually have one and are being modest. The evidence so far is a close camera, a closed mouth and a long look at a young face, and we will take that over a signature.