After This Our Exile on AllMovie

A young boy finds his unwavering loyalty to his loutish dad sealing a decidedly grim fate in Hong Kong director-turned-editor Patrick Tam's first directorial effort since his 1989 thriller My Heart Is That Eternal Rose. There was a time when Chow Cheong-shing (Aaron Kwok) was considered a smooth-talking ladies' man, but many years of gambling have turned him into a bitter and abusive shell of his former self. When Chow's admiring young son (Gow Ian Iskander) reveals to his father that his mother is packing her bags and planning a hasty getaway, the enraged Chow delivers a merciless beating to the woman that leaves father and son to fend for themselves. Now forced to resort to petty thievery as a means of helping dad pay off a series of lingering gambling debts, the young boy soon ends up locked away in a juvenile-detention facility. Soon thereafter, when Chow drops by to visit his son, the boy launches a vicious attack on his father that drives the pair apart for more than a decade. Years later, Chow's son has grown into a man, and is suddenly stricken with an overpowering bout of nostalgia and that leads him back to his old hometown and the quiet streets of his youth. Just then, far off in the distance, the emotionally scarred son catches a glimpse of a man who appears to be his father.