James Hung frames My First of May as a story about gravity, and about the way a life can keep falling long after the first impact. Tang Suk Yin moves through the film like a man following the downward arc of his own biography. He used to be a three time squash champion, a sport built on frantic motion and surgical precision. Now he sits in static decay.
A knee injury ended the career; something in him took a harsher break and never really reset. He sleeps in a rooftop shack, an illegal little perch that matches his status as a peripheral citizen. Hong Kong has a talent for this kind of topographical demotion: the heights belong to the elite, or to the desperate, and Suk Yin has the wrong kind of altitude.
Down below, in the airless density of a subdivided flat, his daughter Chi lives in enforced stillness. A rare spinal disease diagnosed at birth gave her a prognosis she has outlived. That endurance reads like stubbornness elevated into a daily practice, sustained almost entirely by her grandmother, Suen Yau Mui. Suk Yin spends a decade scalping tickets and dodging the domestic tragedy he helped make.
Then the grandmother’s brain cancer arrives like a narrative structural collapse, pushing him back into the apartment. The space imposes a brutal kind of proximity. The walls leave him no room for escape, and the gaze of the child he abandoned stays fixed.
Somatic Echoes and the Theater of Stillness
Acting here works through micro adjustments, the kind that make you watch a face the way you watch a clock hand. Natalie Hsu gives a masterclass in stasis acting as Chi. Her movement is limited to her head and a single finger. Her presence still comes off fierce, scorching, sharply intelligent. She turns her eyes into an instrument of pressure, using silence like a blade that never needs to swing. The film lets you see the sediment of ten years of resentment shifting behind her pupils. The effect recalls the “Great Refusal” from social philosophy: existence itself as protest against an environment that keeps insisting you shrink.
Aaron Kwok trims away his “Heavenly King” charisma and shows up in a posture of defeat. He carries a kind of squalid shame, written into an averted gaze and shoulders that round forward like an apology. He moves like a man trying to minimize his footprint, as if floor space costs money. When he finally collides with Chi, the tiny flat takes on an electric charge. Their arguments land through the words, and through something older than language: two different traumas hitting the same cramped air.
Nina Paw brings the necessary friction as the grandmother. Her voice becomes a rasping tool, prodding her son toward basic humanity with the impatience of someone who has already done the work for too long. She stands in for the invisible scaffolding of the working class, the women who keep families upright through kinetic will until their own bodies fail. Gigi Leung’s brief appearance as the mother also has a clear function. Her absence hangs like a cold, heavy shadow, and it helps explain the jagged way the remaining family members speak, stare, and bruise each other.
The Geometry of Confinement and the Ring Finger
Yau Cheong Leung’s camera turns the apartment into a character, a hostile roommate that never stops leaning in. The space runs on claustrophobic realism. Walls seem to inch forward from scene to scene, tightening the frame like a slow vise. The imagery points straight at Hong Kong’s housing crisis, where “home” can feel like a site of entrapment, not relief. The lighting sharpens that social map. The rooftop unit sits under a harsh, exposed glare; the apartment becomes a patchwork of shadow and the clinical light of medical monitors.
The film’s core symbol is the ring finger. In Chinese it is the wumingzhi, the nameless finger, a small detail with a loaded sting. It carries the film’s idea of connection in miniature, a tiny flicker that refuses to die out. Chi can move only this digit, and the metaphor lands with painful clarity: human agency can shrink to almost nothing, and the impulse to reach out still survives.
Sound keeps pressing the same themes from another angle. The auditory landscape leans hard on the Bee Gees’ “First of May.” It’s a curious choice, giving the film a melancholic whimsy that sits slightly out of phase with the visual grit. The whistled version of the tune works differently. It turns the song into something haunted, a nursery rhyme with teeth, speaking to a childhood lost and to regret that runs in cycles. The ventilator’s hiss and the wheelchair’s hum become the industrial heartbeat of the film, a reminder that Chi’s day to day life sits at the seam where flesh meets machine.
Melodramatic Rhythms and the Shortcut to Catharsis
The film keeps itself to a tight 91 minutes, and that duration enforces a kind of narrative acceleration. The opening tone flirts with domestic comedy: a nagging mother, a lazy son, familiar beats played for a quick sting. The film then pivots into tear jerker machinery. The shift is efficient, and it can feel too fast. Suk Yin jumps from pathological avoidance to committed caregiver with a speed that strains psychological realism. The arc plays like a redemption sprint, brisk and goal oriented, with less time spent in the muck where change usually happens.
Montage becomes the screenplay’s favored tool. Father and daughter bond through a run of snapshots, a cinematic abbreviation that hops over the part of the story with the sharpest teeth. The film gestures toward caretaking, then glides past the grueling, unglamorous labor that defines it. The bedpan. The sleepless nights. The frustration that builds when love and exhaustion share the same room. By sanding down those hardships, the movie slips into sentimental shorthand. It aims for the big cry and gives less attention to the caretaker burden as an ongoing weight.
The film still carries sincerity, even while it follows familiar emotional bait tactics. It plays as a societal mirror for a city facing an aging population and the visible cracks in its social safety net. The ending credits offer a revelation that reframes Chi and pushes a retrospective layer onto what came before. The path is well worn, and the leads keep it from sinking into total cliché. Hung keeps returning to a tremor of hope, small and stubborn, inside a world built to snuff it out.
Directed by James Hung, My First of May (also known as The Ring Finger) premiered in major Asian markets throughout the latter half of 2025, reaching Hong Kong and China on August 22nd. Most recently, the film held its North American premiere on January 16, 2026, marking a significant step for the Hong Kong production’s global footprint. It is currently screening in select international theaters and is expected to arrive on major streaming platforms and Video-On-Demand (VOD) services later this year. Viewers can check local listings or digital platforms like Amazon Prime and Apple TV for upcoming digital release dates.
Full Credits
Title: My First of May
Distributor: GSC Movies, ILLUME Films, Shaw Theatres, Entertaining Power, Sichuan Dalu Pictures
Release date: August 22, 2025 (China, Hong Kong, Macau), September 4, 2025 (Singapore), January 16, 2026 (North America)
Rating: PG-13, 13
Running time: 91 minutes
Director: James Hung
Writers: James Hung, Li Cheuk Fung
Producers and Executive Producers: Kinnie Cheung, Siu May, Calvin Choi
Cast: Aaron Kwok, Natalie Hsu, Nina Paw, Gigi Leung, Patrick Tam, Wing-Cheong Law, Tyson Chak
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Joseph Leung
The Review
My First of May
My First of May is a work of "claustrophobic-sincerity" that relies on the strength of its leads to transcend a formulaic script. While it leans heavily on "sentimental-shorthand" and skips the gritty realities of long-term care, the central performances offer a profound look at the "Great Refusal" of a life lived in stillness. It functions as a moving, if predictable, "societal-mirror" of redemption and familial duty within the vertical constraints of Hong Kong. It is a film that earns its emotional weight through silence rather than its sappy soundtrack.
PROS
- A masterclass in conveying complex inner lives through minimal physical movement.
- Effectively uses the cramped architecture of Hong Kong to heighten the emotional stakes.
- The "ring finger" serves as a poignant, subtle metaphor for human agency.
CONS
- The transition from a deadbeat father to a devoted caretaker feels like a "redemption-sprint."
- The soundtrack and montages occasionally push the film into "emotional-bait" territory.
- The script avoids the grueling daily labor of disability care in favor of tidy highlights.
