Among the most controversial scenes in Dream Home (2010) is one in which the ostensible heroine, Sheung (played by Josie Ho), brutally slays a heavily pregnant housewife. Director Pang Ho-cheung depicts this bloody assault in unflinching, visceral fashion. Sheung, having forced her way into the victim's upscale Hong Kong apartment, has already disposed of the property's domestic worker in gruesome fashion, recalling the extreme luridness of Category III cinema. With predatory venom, Sheung rams a screwdriver into the domestic servant's skull, forcing the woman's left eyeball to burst from its socket and spin across the hardwood floor. Now Sheung corners the hysterical housewife, wrestling her to the ground. Though her victim lies stricken, Sheung refuses to relent. She binds the woman's wrists, ties a plastic vacuum bag over her head, and attaches a live suction hose, cutting off the woman's oxygen. As the asphyxiating housewife squirms on the wooden floor, Sheung passively observes her pathetic, agonising death throes.

As one critic puts it, this is ‘a scene sure to disgust many’ (M. Lee 2010); and predictably enough, various critics expressed high dudgeon at this and certain other scenes in Dream Home. Perhaps surprisingly, however, what these critics found objectionable was not the film's violence per se (which some routinely dismissed as ‘gratuitous’), but that much of the film's violence is initiated and executed by an apparently sympathetic protagonist. A typical grievance finds Sheung to be ‘a character whose motives and behaviour are so difficult to sympathize with’ despite the film's efforts to portray Sheung sympathetically (Ibid.). A stronger version of this perspective holds that ‘Sheung's brutal asphyxiation of a pregnant woman, who aborts her child while dying, destroys any residual empathy [with Sheung]’ (Floyd 2010; my emphasis). Furthermore, Sheung's acts of violence are perceived to be not only repugnant but unjust: ‘None of Sheung's woes … are dire enough to justify killing innocent people in cold blood’ (M. Lee 2010). In essence Dream Home's detractors identify what they take to be an aesthetic and moral defect. They perceive the film to inadvertently undercut its own attempt to generate sympathy for the main protagonist. From this perspective, Dream Home commits what Noël Carroll would call an ‘aesthetic error’ (Carroll 1996: 233).