Ying-suet's hardships continue…In Part Two of Mysterious Murder, she is bullied by her sister-in-law, who demands to take over the household's plentiful finances by questioning the legitimacy of Ying-suet's daughter. Ying-suet accidentally kills the sister-in-law, plunging her future down the abyss. Her former lover suddenly reappears and the simple young man of the past is now a famous detective. Is this salvation for Ying-suet? Or damnation?

Ying-suet has become a complex character, from a girl to a woman, embroiled in love and desire but is forced to suppress her true feelings. Fong, playing a role with such complexity on screen for the first time, handles the transformation beautifully. She embodies Ying-suet with both subtlety and vigour, animating the character's emotions in subtle expressions that are profoundly moving. The masterful Tong directs and scripts the screen version of his own opera, complemented by cinematographer Ho Look-ying's expertly composed images that underscore the film's dramatic cadence. The calibrated expressiveness of the pictorial style strikes an inspired balance between film noir visuals of 1940s western films and the melancholic lyricism of the Chinese poetic tradition. The high level of artistic achievement and commercial acclaim of the film helped convince Fong to continue making films, becoming a true star of both stage and screen. Mysterious Murder has a comfortable place in the pantheon of Cantonese black-and-white cinema.

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