Genre Drama

Tricycle Thief (2014)

Item: Tricycle Thief
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — Tricycle Thief (2014)

Macao is not a location that turns up often in short film production, which makes Tricycle Thief (2014) a minor curiosity straight away. The territory is better known internationally for its casino economy and its reputation as one of the wealthiest places per capita on the planet, so a short drama centred on a tricycle driver scrambling to avoid eviction sits in pointed contrast to all of that. The film runs to just eighteen minutes, placing it firmly in the festival short category rather than the kind of mid-length work that sometimes finds a broader streaming audience, and it arrives courtesy of Pontus Maximus Productions under the direction of Max Bessmertny. Films from Macao are rare enough that each one carries a certain weight simply by existing, and Bessmertny's choice to root the story in the financial precarity of an ordinary working man suggests a film that wants to say something about the gap between the territory's glittering surface and the lives of those who keep its streets moving.

The three principal cast members are Aeson Lei, Sam Leung Kin-Ping, and Chu Wing Mui. Short films live or die on the ability of their performers to communicate a great deal in very little time, and this kind of stripped-back cast list, with no recognisable international names to lean on, asks the audience to meet the film on its own terms from the first frame. The genre mix of drama, mystery, and crime is an interesting combination for a short: it suggests something more than a straightforward social realist piece, hinting at moral or narrative complications alongside the central premise of a man in financial desperation. For other drama films that have come up on this blog, including Edward Yang's Yi Yi and the French drama Mustang, the genre tends to demand patience and a willingness to sit with characters in uncomfortable circumstances, and Tricycle Thief appears to be asking something similar of its viewers, even within its tight runtime.

It is also worth placing the film in the context of short filmmaking in the early 2010s more broadly. The period saw a genuine flowering of ambitious short work produced outside the traditional studio centres, partly enabled by more accessible digital production tools. Other short films from around the same era that have featured here, such as The OceanMaker and Luigi, illustrate just how varied that wave of short-form storytelling turned out to be in terms of ambition, craft, and execution. Tricycle Thief belongs to that same moment, though its regional specificity and its social concerns give it a rather different flavour from most of its contemporaries.

A-Z World Movie Tour Macau I guess it's supposed to show the disparity between such a rich place, but from the perspective of such a poor person. Had me interested at first, the visuals are crisp, the setting feels authentic, and there’s a quiet kind of storytelling that’s pretty rare in shorts these days. The atmosphere is strong, and the concept definitely has potential. Some really solid moments that made me lean in. But man… that ending just *deflates* everything. No payoff, no clarity, just ambiguity for the sake of it, it feels. You invest a little time and emotion, only to be left wondering if you missed something or if the filmmakers just didn’t know how to land the plane. It’s not bad by any means, just frustrating. Good looking. Interesting idea. But without a meaningful conclusion, it ends up going nowhere.

That frustration is one I recognise from plenty of short films that get so much right in the setup and the atmosphere, only to fumble the final moments in a way that colours everything that came before it. For me, ambiguity in short film can be genuinely powerful when it feels earned, when it grows out of the story rather than arriving in place of a conclusion the filmmakers perhaps had not quite worked out. Here it left me doing the work the film should have done itself. There is real craft on screen, and the Macao setting alone makes it worth eighteen minutes of your time as a one-off, but I came away wishing someone in the edit room had pushed a little harder for a landing. A good-looking film that stops just short of being a good film.

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

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Trailer

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