‘The House On The Moon’ review: Singapore’s Nelson Yeo turns Chinese moon goddess myth into ponderous flight of fancy

Dir: Nelson Yeo. Singapore, Taiwan. 2026. 99mins

The Chinese myth of Chang Er, the goddess of the moon, fuels Nelson Yeo’s visually arresting but narratively opaque reimagining of the story of the eternal being and her archer husband Hou Yi. The first Singaporean wuxia feature film boasts plenty of spectacular imagery but the emphasis is on poetic rumination rather than martial arts or swordplay, so that it feels more of a kindred spirit to the work of Wong Kar Wai than Zhang Yimou.

Never quite achieves the gravity it’s striving for 

That combination, added to a story that, while straightforward in basic terms, remains elusive in its emotional detail, may make The House On The Moon a challenging sell after its premiere in competition at Locarno, where the director won the Golden Leopard for his first feature Dreaming & Dying in 2023. Punctuated with visual poetry, it never quite achieves the gravity it’s striving for – although its distinctive look should see it travel widely on the festival circuit. 

Intertitles and a handful of flashbacks clue us in to the backstory of Chang Er (Lim Shi-Ann and, later, briefly, Doreen Toh) and Hou Yi (Dominick Rustam), who save the Earth after it is threatened by ten blazing Suns by shooting down nine of them. Gifted mortality elixirs, it is Chang Er who drinks two of them to prevent them falling into the hands of thief Peng Meng (Harry Chang) and then floats up to the moon, where she is reunited with Hou Yi. This is essentially the starting point for Yeo’s flight of fancy, which imagines what happens after Hou Yi finds himself on another mission to save the remaining dying Sun and goes missing in the process.

The bulk of the action concerns Chang Er’s attempts to search for her husband in an odyssey that will take her to the dark side of the moon. Along the way there will be lots of beautifully-appointed mooning about and encounters that see her express and work through her yearnings for her missing love, which may test the patience of audiences expecting action sequences. Bad guy Peng Meng, who is given an underwritten tragic romantic trajectory, reappears from time to time as Yeo chops about with action from Chang Er’s moon quest to his dictatorial machinations on Earth. 

While a lot of Chang Er’s encounters involve gnomic observations on love and destiny such as, “The stream flows with the current, only the foolish swim against it”, humour is injected by the Earth-born Nangyang Bandit (Akira Huang). He has fetched up on the moon for complicated reasons, and moves from antagonist to something else as the story unfolds. He also carries with him a severed arm he refers to as “a backscratcher” but which, at key – and, it must be said, highly convenient moments – springs into action like the Addams’ Family’s Thing. The tonal shift of this is quite jarring when set against the film’s more balletic passages. 

The consistent positive is stylish lensing from Lincoln Yeo, particularly saturated scenes that glow with the burning heat of the sun in contrast to others that take on an alien coolness as the characters cross the stark, volcanic-looking lunar landscape. Costume work from Meredith Lee, who has previously worked in the costume department on films including Mulan and Crazy Rich Asians, is also notable. Red is used as a significant colour, especially in scenes involving Yue Lao, the god of love (Tsai Ming-Lai regular Lee Kang-sheng), and Lee creates a layered, calm look for Chang Er that adds ethereality to Lim’s delicate performance.