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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
LifestyleEntertainment

Review | Showbiz Spy movie review: Anson Lo of Hong Kong boy band Mirror challenges gender norms in harmlessly diverting entertainment satire

  • The boy band member portrays an investigator who goes undercover as a woman to infiltrate an exploitative reality-TV contest for wannabe pop stars
  • The irony, of course, is that the film satirises the kind of contest that produced Mirror and its protagonist is played by one of the system’s biggest winners

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Heidi Lee (left), Anson Lo and Chloe So in a still from Showbiz Spy (category IIA; Cantonese), directed by Keian Choi.
Edmund Lee

2.5/5 stars

Showbiz Spy is a pop-idol vehicle ostensibly churned out to make a quick buck off of Anson Lo Hon-ting, the Mirror boy band member who became a superstar overnight in Hong Kong this year by appearing in the gay romcom series Ossan’s Love on ViuTV.

Frivolous yet harmlessly diverting, Showbiz Spy makes a half-hearted attempt at satiring the star-making system through which Lo and his band mates achieved their meteoric rise in the first place.

We never learn the real name of Lo’s character in Showbiz Spy, which opens with an uncomfortable scene in which he pretends to be a schoolboy to tease out the predatory behaviour of a rich, gay photography enthusiast.

The protagonist, we learn, is working for a non-profit organisation named the “International Association for the Physical and Mental Health Development of Underage Boys and Girls”, whose long title is the gag.

Its mission sees Lo disguise himself as a girl named Cercis – doesn’t the International Association … have any female employees? – to infiltrate a reality show similar in nature to ViuTV’s King Maker, except that this fictional one, created by Andrew Lam Man-chung’s sinister mastermind, exploits its participants by charging exorbitant training and styling fees. For some reason, it only takes girl contestants.

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