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Parents are great. They’re so selfless when it comes to their children. They’ll sacrifice everything for them no matter what… If you shiver at the thought of having these messages bombard your senses for another 110 minutes, then you’d better look away from Jacob Cheung’s preaching session, Ticket, which spouts its lessons on parental love with all the subtlety of a brick heaved through a glass window.

Interweaving three stories on the topic, but with two of those merely functioning as loudspeakers for the filmmaker to make his point, the film begins with a couple that decide to give birth to their baby – despite the latter being diagnosed with an incurable disease while still in the womb. Meanwhile, in the film’s central story, the journalist covering the couple’s ordeal, Yue (Zuo Xiaoqing), receives a train ticket from her foster mother as a hint to find her unknown birth mother, thus leading to a picture postcard journey to exotic regions in rural China. The third storyline involves a single father, his autistic son, and a closing train door.

With cloying sentimental music dominating the soundtrack, Ticket reveals a filmmaker trying too hard to dramatise a story that’s strong enough to work on its own – quietly. Towards the film’s end, the father in the third story happens to walk past a TV, which is broadcasting aloud the interview footage of the couple from the first story. He stops and watches amid the moving crowd, smiling agreeably. I, on the other hand, left the theatre feeling the same way about parental love as a post-treatment Alex did about porn in A Clockwork Orange.

Edmund Lee

Dir Jacob Cheung, Category I, 110 mins.

In cinemas now: AMC, Broadway, GH, Grand.