Spacked Out is Hong Kong’s answer to Larry Clark’s Kids

In a pastel-coloured and turbulent turn-of-the-century Hong Kong, four teen girls drift through days spent at school and in karaoke parlours and gaming arcades. Fashion-obsessed Sissy (Christy Cheung) shoplifts glitter nail polish from the mall. Skinhead “dyke” Bean Curd (Maggie Poon) picks fights. Lolita-like Banana (Angela Au) fields phone-sex clients on her chunky flip phone. And 13-year-old Cookie (Debbie Tam), neglected by her parents and her VCD-hawking boyfriend, mourns the loss of her bestie to reform school. She also suspects that she might be pregnant. 

Directionless summer days eventually carry this gaggle of delinquents from the outer reaches of the city into the neon sprawl of Mong Kok, where drug-huffing parties with Triad-linked boys and visits to the abortion clinic beckon, in Lawrence Lau’s visceral Y2K time capsule, Spacked Out. Often likened to Larry Clark’s Kids due to its raw, social realist style and confronting subject matter, it’s one of Hong Kong’s most unfiltered portraits of teen angst and girlhood in the modern age. 

A criminally under-seen indie classic in the West (it’s only been exhibited twice before in the UK), Spacked Out marks a jewel in the programming of this year’s third annual Hong Kong Film Festival UK (HKFFUK). It also came out of a fascinating period in Hong Kong history. Filmed just two years after the 1997 Handover, which ended 156 years of British colonial rule with the return of autonomy to the Mainland, the film would come to exemplify an industry in flux, wherein both production models and storytelling focuses were shifting dramatically. 

Once a nexus for big-budget, bullet-laden action movies, Hong Kong’s film industry was stunted by nose-diving production figures and slashed budgets in the 90s, as uncertainty over the future elsewhere drove talent overseas. Out of the ashes of this disruption, new figureheads like Y2K crime auteur Johnnie To emerged, as the popularity of transgressive underground films like Fruit Chan’s urban youth drama Made in Hong Kong fuelled a wider industry shake-up.

When To’s new production company, Milkyway Image, approached filmmaker Lau in the late 90s, it was evident that unvarnished, confrontational storytelling was resonating in a society steeped in tumult. Lau, who had previously explored male youth alienation in the 1988 film Gangs, felt that a coming-of-age story set in the satellite suburbs, where young people felt adrift, could be vital. And with a teen girl’s viewpoint, it could offer a valuable new perspective at a time when the government’s perceived failure to care for its marginalised youths was a pressing social issue. 

Armed with a very low budget, he and his crew headed to Tuen Mun – a new, outer-limits town where “unruly behaviour and unlawful activities were committed by disaffected youth staving off boredom”, the director tells Dazed. There, they began casting “candid, quick-witted and expressive” kids off the streets and straight out of school for a free-form venture into the angry corners of Hong Kong youth culture. The results were unsettling and profound.

None of our chosen actors actually experienced abortions, they had acquaintances who had. Some of them were as young as 12 or 13 – and had undergone the procedure multiple times

Spacked Out’s cinéma vérité style – handheld cameras, natural lighting, location shooting, and “no rehearsals ever” – is what makes scenes of underage drinking, pill-popping, and inter-clique confrontations feel so vividly authentic. But there’s a deeper level of authenticity to it, too. Certain elements of the script were directly inspired by stories from the cast and other young people. “[Some of them] would be smuggling mobile phones across the border into China for cash, or juggling multiple boyfriends to get maximum benefits from them,” Lau tells Dazed. In an interview included on the Kani Releasing Blu-ray, released in the US in 2023, meanwhile, assistant director Tse Loh Sze claims that the drug paraphernalia used as props was made by the actors themselves. Even more stirring was the incorporation of violent footage of self-harm involving a box cutter: Loh Sze says that they noticed scars on the arms of Maggie Poon while they were shooting a pool swimming scene, which led to the shooting of some of the film’s most disturbing footage.

The film’s allusions to teen sex are perhaps even more discomfiting. Angela Au was only 16 at the time of production and (unlike some of her co-stars) came from a relatively innocent background. “I studied in a very good all-girl school,” she tells Dazed. “My parents were quite strict and didn’t allow me to go out at night. I didn’t even know how to swear, and had to learn all of those words from the crew.” An alarmingly intimate scene involving Au’s character, Banana, and a pubescent boy was “a challenge” for the young actress, which she overcame by convincing the director to cast her real-life teen boyfriend to play the role opposite her in the movie.

A graphic abortion scene, meanwhile, would cause problems with the censors. And though the film was eventually passed with an adults-only ‘Category III’ rating in Hong Kong, the context behind the latter scene’s inclusion remains disturbing: “While none of our chosen actors actually experienced abortions, they had acquaintances who had,” says Lau. “Some of them were as young as 12 or 13 – and had [undergone the procedure] multiple times.”

Spacked Out’s unpredictable format was acutely inspired by a popular late-night radio show on Commercial Radio Hong Kong, which also supplied the film’s title (assumedly a riff on the term “spaced out”). The show’s “no one at the wheel” structure enabled listeners to call in and tell personal stories in an unstructured fashion, closing a crucial gap between how the media would portray people’s lives and how individuals felt themselves. It’s a pop culture snapshot encapsulated in the film’s bubble-writing-adorned opening titles, where Cookie languishes in floral PJs in a bedroom full of cuddly toys and Hello Kitty merchandise, as voice messages can be heard gossiping about crushes, break-ups, and pop star Aaron Kwok.

This scene captures another engrossing quality of Spacked Out: it’s a time capsule of retro Hong Kong style, built on candy-coloured fashions, pig-tails, and plastic phone accessories, set to a soundtrack of baggy hip-hop beats, hedonistic breaks, and dreamlike moments of ambience. “It’s very MK’,” Au tells Dazed, referring to the local terminology used to describe a prevalent youth culture in Mong Kok. The latter neighbourhood, a buzzing retail centre on the Kowloon peninsula, “is especially known for its plethora of stores selling knick-knacks, playthings, clothing, electronics, and novelties,” she continues. “It draws in teenagers… though the term ‘MK person’ is often used to describe a person who blindly follows trends, has poor taste, or behaves in a bad way.”

But the delirious slow motion, crossfades, jump cuts, and occasional blue-green filters also infuse Spacked Out with a deeper, more enduring kind of nostalgia – not for the garish fashions and fleeting trends it depicts, but for the golden age of Hong Kong arthouse cinema in the 1990s. It’s the product of a crew that boasted unexpectedly robust experience, given the film’s minimal budget. Among them: Wong Chi Ming, a “master of the lights” whose credentials include Wong Kar-wai’s debut feature As Tears Go By, and director of photography Yiu-Fai Lai, a former assistant to key Wong collaborator Christopher Doyle on films like Happy Together. Lai would later go on to shoot Infernal Affairs and 2046. For his work on Spacked Out in 2000, though, Lai would be nominated for Best Cinematography at the Golden Horse Awards — ultimately losing out to his former mentor, Doyle, who claimed the prize alongside Mark Lee Ping-bing for In the Mood for Love that year.

Spacked Out hasn’t quite carved out quite as rich a legacy as the latter film, but during times of widespread inequality, crises of self-identity, and global political turmoil, its themes still resonate. And if nothing else, it’s a timely reminder that for all the sex and drugs still poisoning minds today, we can always seek solace in Chupa Chups lollies, hair braids, and Dance Dance Revolution.

Spacked Out screens at London’s Rio Cinema, on September 17