The Infernal Affairs Trilogy: Double Bind

Essays—

Nov 15, 2022

This essay reveals plot details from all three Infernal Affairs films.

There’s a beautiful moment of calm before the storm in the superb crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002), before all the tricky double-dealings, tense rooftop rendezvous, and shadowy back-alley pursuits begin. Shopping at an electronics store in Hong Kong’s bustling Kowloon District, Lau Kin-ming (Andy Lau Tak-wah) approaches Chen Wing-yan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who he assumes is the proprietor, in probably the movie’s most innocuous case of mistaken identity. The men don’t recognize each other from 1991, more than a decade earlier, when they were cadets at the same police academy. Chen doesn’t know that Lau is a detective, and Lau doesn’t know that Chen is a triad gangster. Nor do they know each other’s true identities—though, crucially, we do: Chen is really an undercover cop, working from within to take down the very criminal organization that has secretly embedded Lau as a mole within the police force.

For all these devilishly intricate spy games, the mood here is curiously serene. Enjoying a moment’s respite, the men strike up an easy camaraderie, buoyed by the charisma of two megastars in their prime. Infernal Affairs and its two successors, all three directed by Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak, may derive their conceptual cool and philosophical gravity from the Buddhist notion of “continuous hell,” but for the moment Chen and Lau are ensconced in a shimmering consumerist purgatory. And it’s in this purely transactional context that these two strangers and enemies, trapped in cycles of deceit, can each reveal something honest about who they are. For Lau, criminality has become a means to a socially respectable end: he loves the perks of the perceived straight and narrow, among them his marriage to Mary (Sammi Cheng Sau-man), a novelist; a nice new apartment; and a secure foothold in Hong Kong’s consumer economy. Chen dreams more modestly of freedom, a life off the streets, a desk job. Years of busts and beatings (some endured, some inflicted) haven’t expunged his fundamental decency: even when he’s just minding the store, he wouldn’t dream of ripping you off.

Lau leaves with a tube amplifier, a purchase that will come back to haunt him during the story’s climactic unraveling. But first, he and Chen test a couple of speakers, playing the Taiwanese singer Tsai Chin’s 1980 hit “Forgotten Time,” a melancholy song of memory that, like everything else in this suavely multitasking movie, operates on multiple levels. Like a thread weaving its way through a labyrinth, the song pointedly recurs in Infernal Affairs II and Infernal Affairs III (both 2003), each time ushering the rare sound of a woman’s voice into this intensely masculine world, with its neglectful fathers, disobedient sons, and treacherous brotherhoods. Again and again, too, the song raises the specter of an irretrievable past, not just for Chen and Lau but for Hong Kong itself, here just a few years into its governance under China’s “one country, two systems” policy. It is a city-state that, no less profoundly than these two endlessly thwarted and conflicted double agents, is enduring its own crisis of identity.

Infernal Affairs is the first collaboration between the Hong Kong–born filmmakers Andrew Lau (not to be confused with Andy Lau, speaking of doubling) and Mak. By that time, Mak had directed a handful of features, including the psychological horror movie Nude Fear (1998) and the triad drama A War Named Desire (2000). Andrew Lau had shot and directed several entries in the triad-themed Young and Dangerous film series; he had also worked as a cinematographer on Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By (1988) and Chungking Express (1994). (Indeed, something of Wong’s dreamy visual signature—his cool fish-tank greens and warm, burnished golds—persists in the color palette of the trilogy, which Lau coshot as well as codirected.) The script for Infernal Affairs is by Mak and Felix Chong Man-keung, who had written the 2001 romantic comedy Dance of a Dream (directed by Andrew Lau and starring Andy Lau). After their success with the Infernal Affairs trilogy, Andrew Lau, Mak, and Chong would all three reunite on the action films Initial D (2005) and Confession of Pain (2006), while Mak and Chong would codirect the Overheard movies (2009, 2011, and 2014), another Hong Kong crime trilogy. But none of them was likely dreaming about this kind of sustained collaboration when cameras started rolling on the first Infernal Affairs; they simply wanted to make a good, profitable movie in an industry that badly needed one.

It soon became clear that they had significantly surpassed their expectations. Released in December 2002 to record-breaking grosses and subsequently screened to much acclaim at international festivals, Infernal Affairs swiftly became known as the film that saved Hong Kong cinema. It rejuvenated a domestic box office that had been devastated by piracy and would soon be devastated anew by the 2002–03 SARS epidemic. It swept the 2003 Hong Kong Film Awards, winning Best Film, Best Actor (Leung), and Best Director, among other categories. And it spawned an Oscar-winning Hollywood remake in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006). That film may have struck more than a few Infernal Affairs fans (this one included) as a solid if inferior redo, but there’s something fitting about the idea of this Hong Kong crime saga spawning its own popular American double. Hong Kong action filmmakers, after all, had been drawing energy and inspiration from American gangster movies for decades.

The Infernal Affairs trilogy itself is a brilliant example of this cultural cross-pollination at work. Its elaborate machinations hark back to various 1980s Hong Kong crime classics, including John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer and Ringo Lam’s City on Fire—all rife with the kinds of moral ambiguities that would become increasingly difficult to forge in the more censorious post-1997-handover Hong Kong industry. But the trilogy’s debt to Hollywood cinema is no less profound. For one, there’s that hellishly punny title, which can’t help but reference Mike Figgis’s 1990 corrupt-cops thriller, Internal Affairs. And if the first Infernal Affairs feels heavily influenced by the cops-and-gangsters symmetry of Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), the trilogy as a whole echoes the long arc of Francis Ford Coppola’s three Godfather epics: the first chapter sees one mob leader fall and his (symbolic) son rise; the second chapter rewinds a generation to move the pieces into position; and the third chapter follows the new kingpin to his lonely, despairing end.

Perhaps not coincidentally, however, the trilogy’s most significant Hollywood inspiration also happened to be directed by Hong Kong legend Woo. The first Infernal Affairs in particular channels his Face/Off (1997) in a more realistic, less operatic key—this time with the two nemeses switching places rather than faces, and with a focus on character-driven suspense and procedural minutiae over balletic action. The violence is minimal, the storytelling rigorously spare, the action inexorably circular; it’s as if the characters were already being sucked into a whirlpool of their own making. The movie doesn’t advance so much as spin hypnotically on its axis, a narrative centrifuge whose every rotation generates both extreme chaos and a strange, terrible clarity.

The early drug-bust sequence, sprawling yet concise, offers an example of this circular momentum. A restlessly gliding camera embeds us within two concurrent planes of action: as triad boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang Chi-wai) prepares to buy a shipment of cocaine from his Thai associates, Chen secretly relays messages from their meeting to Superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) via finger-tapped Morse code, while Lau, for his part, wires Sam into the action at police headquarters. Amid this precisely orchestrated symphony of flipped phones, switched channels, and increasingly furrowed brows, an ever-tightening stalemate ensues. By the end, neither side has won, but both know they’ve been infiltrated—and with both moles surely now living on borrowed time, an endgame has been set in motion. “The loser will die,” Superintendent Wong declares at a public face-off with Sam’s gang, and his words will prove terribly accurate: for himself, Sam, and—finally—Chen, the movie’s tortured but unblemished heart and soul.

Leung—who had already played a cop (in Chungking Express), a gangster (in 1990’s Bullet in the Head), and a cop pretending to be a gangster (in 1992’s Hard Boiled)—here slips into one of his finest roles with commanding ease. He is suitably roughed-up for the part, looking scruffier than usual in open-necked shirts and a black leather jacket, and sporting unkempt bangs that partially obscure his famously expressive eyebrows. But in his rare off-the-clock moments, Chen exudes a surprising lightness, warmth, and even flirtatiousness—especially in scenes with his sympathetic therapist, Dr. Lee Sum-yee (Kelly Chen Wai-lam)—that further compound the tragic weight of his personal sacrifice. Only when he meets on a rooftop with Wong, the sole other person who knows he’s one of the good guys, can he fully vent his fury at having been given an assignment that looks ever more like a death sentence. And so it is, for both of them: apart from Chen’s own death at the hands of another of Sam’s moles (in an impeccably foreshadowed twist), there may be no more wrenching moment in Infernal Affairs than when Superintendent Wong’s slain, tortured body crashes to earth—and Chen, on the scene, can barely stifle the shock, horror, and devastation that he knows, if expressed, would fatally betray him.

As Chen’s calculating nemesis Lau, Andy Lau is the cooler, more emotionally contained—but also more insidious—presence. Everything about Lau—his tailored suits, his clean-shaven countenance, his enviable calm under pressure—is a carefully studied element in a performance that he’s got down cold. But is it more than just a performance? Lau himself may not entirely know. He’s so good at pulling you into a close, queasy intimacy that it comes as a nasty shock when he reminds you of how ruthless he can be, whether he’s setting in motion the events that will lead to the superintendent’s death or taking personal, deadly aim at another boss who has outlived his usefulness. Still, the truth will out. There’s his habit of slapping official documents against his thigh (a counterpoint to Chen’s tap-tap-tapping fingers), a nervous tic that becomes a fateful tell. And there’s the look of fear and perhaps something more—could it be remorse?—that steals across his face as Infernal Affairs concludes and he feels, perhaps for the first time, the walls beginning to close in.

Infernal Affairs ends with three of its four principals dead, meaning that, barring some twin-brother contrivance in the manner of Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II (1987), a sequel would require a significant shift in focus. But in crafting not one but two feature follow-ups, Andrew Lau, Mak, and Chong demonstrated an agility and resourcefulness worthy of their own double agents, rewinding, advancing, and deepening the story on multiple fronts. If neither film matched the commercial and cultural impact of the first, the trilogy as a whole still stands out for its exemplary narrative and thematic cohesion, all the more remarkable for each chapter’s unique dramatic emphasis and chronological structure.

The particular inspiration of Infernal Affairs II, an expansive prequel that begins roughly a decade before the events of its predecessor, is to focus on not only the younger versions of Chen and Lau (played, respectively and effectively, by Shawn Yue Man-lok and Edison Chen Koon-hei) but also the two mentor figures, Wong and Sam, and their own unlikely, ultimately unsustainable alliance. Anthony Wong and Tsang, such electrifying adversaries in the first film, here dig their way to an astonishing place of mutual tenderness; it’s as if the characters already know that, as they rise in their respective ranks, their friendship is doomed—thus making it all the more precious in the present. Our knowledge that they and Chen and Lau will survive to the end of this chapter provides only the faintest consolation.

In its conception of both narrative complication and human agony, Infernal Affairs II literally doubles down; in some ways, it’s an even more delirious feat of structural multiplication than its predecessor. The doubling is downright vertiginous; there are two police moles (including Chen), two parallel hostage situations, and even two women named Mary. Over the course of the film, both Wong and Sam will reveal surprising moral dimensions: before he becomes a ruthless kingpin, the lower-ranking Sam is shown to possess a merciful conscience and a generous team spirit; meanwhile, Wong, the revered police veteran, is nearly imprisoned for his scandalous role in the assassination of Ngai Kwun (Joe Cheung Tung-cho), head of the Ngai crime family. Both men will also lose someone dear to them: for Wong, it’s his honorable colleague Superintendent Luk (Hu Jun), killed by a car bomb intended for Wong, and for Sam, it’s his fiercely loving and loyal wife, Mary Hon (Carina Lau Ka-ling), murdered for her role in Kwun’s death.

Anthony Wong Chau-sang and Eric Tsang Chi-wai in Infernal Affairs II

In contrast with the first film’s compact time frame, Infernal Affairs II spans six years, beginning in 1991, roughly around the time when Chen and Lau agree to go undercover, and ending in July 1997, with a government ceremony marking Hong Kong’s official return to China after more than a century of British colonial rule. It’s the trilogy’s most explicit acknowledgment of an enormously destabilizing cultural, financial, and political shift, and it provides an aptly unsettled frame for a mob drama about crumbling regimes, divided loyalties, and brutal transfers of power. We eventually learn that Kwun’s ruthless, coolly authoritative son and successor, Hau (an outstanding Francis Ng Chun-yu), happens to be Chen’s older half brother—a development that retroactively accounts for, but also renders extraordinary, Chen’s decision to turn spy for the police and betray his own rotten flesh and blood.

Lau, on the other hand, is well on his way to becoming the opposite, not only killing Kwun on Mary Hon’s orders but also arranging her death when she spurns his advances. It is Mary, not coincidentally, who puts on “Forgotten Time” in this film. The song can’t help but draw us back to the first Infernal Affairs, reminding us, curiously, of events that have yet to come to pass. But it’s precisely that paradox that lends these two films such astonishing emotional force; it’s especially harrowing to witness the crucibles of suffering endured by Wong, Sam, and Chen, knowing the grim fates that still await them a few years hence. The sight of Chen saluting the gravestone of a fallen comrade, a brave assertion of loyalty to an institution that has brought them both nothing but pain and loss, echoes numerous other such salutes throughout the trilogy: doubled and redoubled through past, present, and future, the image conjures a vision of death and violence without end.

In an alternate ending to the first Infernal Affairs, which Andrew Lau and Mak shot to appease moralistic government censors in Mainland China and Malaysia, Lau is exposed and arrested for his crimes. That compromised outcome is rendered even more nonsensical by the events of Infernal Affairs III, which folds a prequel and a sequel into one feverishly crosscutting narrative. The first strand follows Chen (again played by Leung) roughly six months before the events of the first film, a period during which the strain of his deception, exacerbated by the pressures of Sam’s latest business dealings, pushes him to the brink of mental collapse. The second strand picks up ten months after Chen’s death and follows Lau (again played by Andy Lau), now installed as the head of internal affairs, as he tries to cover his tracks but only initiates his own downward spiral. The circular momentum that defines the Infernal Affairs trilogy is realized here in the spectacle of two men circling madness: Chen, through love and perseverance, manages to escape it, while Lau, abandoned by his wife and alienated from his colleagues, finally succumbs.

The symmetry is compounded further by two other individuals who fatefully intersect with Chen and Lau in both timelines. One is the therapist, Dr. Lee (a returning Kelly Chen), whose attempts to treat Chen using hypnosis tilt delightfully into full-blown romantic comedy; more than a year later, after Chen’s death, Dr. Lee begins treating Lau and unexpectedly hears his criminal confession. The other key figure is an unnervingly inscrutable police inspector, Yeung Kam-wing (Leon Lai), whose own allegiances are, for a while, a mystery. Yeung bedevils both moles; he arrests Chen for senselessly attacking a potential business partner on Sam’s orders, and he becomes a persistent thorn in the side of Lau, who suspects that Yeung may be one of Sam’s remaining moles and thus poses an intolerable threat. Yeung is a threat, though not for the reasons that Lau fears, and the cluster of entangled revelations at the end of Infernal Affairs III serves two purposes: to provide Chen with a fleeting but precious sense of brotherhood in his final months of life, and to visit upon Lau every mortal consequence he has eluded until now.

Kelly Chen Wai-lam and Leung in Infernal Affairs III

An overpowering sense of loss, loneliness, and futility haunts the trilogy’s final chapter, which ushers in a number of new characters—including the wily Chinese gangster Shen Chen (Chen Daoming), later unmasked as an undercover cop—yet feels underpopulated to an eerie, almost ghostly degree. There are scattered group and crowd sequences, but there is little of the first two films’ intoxicating human density; the thrill is gone, very much by design, leaving only dread and paranoia in its wake. The movie’s signature image is of Lau working away at his desk on a huge and otherwise vacant floor, an internal affairs division of one.

If Chen Wing-yan ultimately died in vain in Infernal Affairs, Lau is shown to live in vain, which is far, far worse. By the end, even the merciful death he tries to claim for himself proves elusive, and he is left in the purest possible definition of “continuous hell”: adrift and unreachable, visited by an ex-wife who brings tidings of a child he will never know, tormented by the remembrance of all that he has done and lost. One last burst of “Forgotten Time” surges on the soundtrack and, as ever, draws us back, back to that chance encounter with Chen in the electronics store—a vision of a brotherhood that might have been, and of a Hong Kong beyond reach.

It’s hard to listen to that song again now and not hear a bittersweet elegy for Hong Kong cinema itself, or at least for that creatively inspired moment in the past when a few upstart filmmakers came together and produced something remarkable: a crime trilogy whose sustained formal acumen, narrative intricacy, and moral complexity achieved an international high-water mark for the cop picture and the gangster picture alike. But like any extraordinary achievement, the movies could only do so much in the end. Some two decades after the first Infernal Affairs emerged, the industry that produced it—ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic—feels more in need of salvation than ever. The Infernal Affairs films didn’t—and couldn’t—save Hong Kong cinema. All they could do was give it a few of its finest hours.

The Infernal Affairs Trilogy: Double Bind

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