[V FOR VENGEANCE: Blood Ties stars Malaysian actress Joey Leong and Yap Hei Long.]

By Tay Yek Keak

FRANKLY, at first I thought home-grown supernatural crime drama Blood Ties was a Hong Kong movie.

It has that under-lit urban mystery look, especially in scenes featuring cops in a tense station, which seem as though they could have come from Infernal Affairs or a Johnnie To expose into a seedy underbelly of some kind.

Actually, it even sounded Hong Kong-ish because some conversations - principally between the two imported big names, Hong Kong veterans Cheng Pei Pei and Kenneth Tsang - were conducted in Cantonese.

In fact, there were so many dialects swirling around, it was like a mini-United Nations.

The HK vets spoke Canto, the gangsters Hokkien, the local cast Mandarin, and, of course, our Singapore brand of English was sputtered out as a sort of endemic tongue.

They weave around a plot - told in a hip, albeit quite confusing flashback-forward style - which sees a girl (Malaysian actress Joey Leong) being possessed by the spirit of her murdered cop-brother to wreak revenge on his killers.

But for me to dwell on the many tongues spouted in the movie would be to miss the main point of the movie, by director Chai Yee Wei, a 33-year-old Singaporean short-film maker.

Blood Ties is significant as a local film in that it's the first of nine films which have been given a whopping $250,000 grant each under the New Feature Film Fund by the Singapore Film Commission (SFC).

Here's my two cents' worth on Blood Ties, the first result of that expenditure: It's an impressive start.

Plus, it reigned at No. 6 at the Singapore box office last weekend (Sept 11-13).

Budgeted at $850,000, the M18-rated flick took in around $112,000 last weekend.

To be clear, my take of the film is that it's too slow to be a thriller and too un-scary to be a chiller.

But though it has its flaws, it also is a bona fide big-screener which infuses the supernatural (a hugely popular draw in this part of the world) and the detective noir drama.

Director Chai shoots it with little sentiment and touristy flattery, which it deserves.

And in another nod to the element of internationalism, he dares to show the police force here as something less than perfect.

It's not too unlike Kelvin Tong's intriguing Rule Number One (2008), a Hong Kong-based thriller which I've always considered to be smarter than its audience.

Blood Ties is more obvious and simpler than that movie, but I suspect that like Tong's film, the quality it has may elude some viewers.

It's a quality which makes it a worthy starter for eight more anticipated local films to come.

From Jack Neo to Eric Khoo to Royston Tan, we've had variations of the Singapore film.

Hopefully, the upcoming works of SFC grant recipients such as Ellery Ngiam (with his movie Forgotten Tears), Wee Li Lin (Forever), Alaric Tay (Thunder Boys) and Boo Junfeng (Sandcastle) will give us a fresh look at ourselves.

myp@sph.com.sg

Blood Ties is showing in cinemas.

For more my paper stories click here.