Genre Drama

Tricycle Thief (2014)

Item: Tricycle Thief
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — Tricycle Thief (2014)

There's a moment early in Tricycle Thief where the setting just does the work for you. Macau, one of the wealthiest places on the planet, and here we are ground-level with someone who has nothing. That contrast is genuinely interesting, and for a short film it's a promising place to start. I leaned in. I wanted to see where it was going.

And for a while, it earns that goodwill. The visuals are crisp, properly so, and the atmosphere feels lived-in and authentic. There's a quiet patience to the storytelling that you don't get very often in short films. Most shorts are in such a rush to make their point that they forget to breathe. This one breathes. The setting carries a lot of weight, and the concept, showing the sharp edges of inequality through the eyes of someone on the losing side of it, has real potential. Some of the moments genuinely land. I was with it.

But then it ends. And I sat there thinking, "Was that it?"

Look, I'm not someone who needs everything spelled out. Ambiguity can be powerful when it's earned, when it comes from a place of intention and leaves you with something to chew on. Think of the kind of quiet, devastating restraint in Yi Yi, where what's left unsaid carries enormous weight. That's a completely different thing to what happens here. This feels less like deliberate ambiguity and more like the film just didn't know how to finish what it started. There's no payoff, no clarity, not even the satisfying ache of a story that's chosen to end on an open note with purpose. It deflates. All that atmosphere, all that careful groundwork, and then nothing lands.

And that's genuinely frustrating, because the pieces were there. The disparity between Macau's glittering wealth and the poverty running beneath it is a rich subject, no pun intended. A short film is actually a perfect format for something like this, a single slice, one perspective, one moment that illuminates something bigger. But you have to commit to the landing. You can't just let the film drift off and hope the audience fills in the gap for you.

What I'm left with is a film that looks good, sounds interesting on paper, and has a handful of moments that made me sit up. But without a meaningful conclusion it ends up, as I said on Letterboxd, going nowhere. It's not bad, I want to be clear about that. There's craft here, there's thought behind the camera. I've sat through far worse. But potential that goes unfulfilled is its own kind of disappointment, sometimes more so than a film that was never trying in the first place.

Part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, with Macau ticked off the list. On to the next one. Two stars.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2025-07-13

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