Delete My Love 2014

So Po-Wing, Wong Cho-Lam, known to everyone as “So Boring,” seems to have little going for him in both his career and his personal life. His office is a pressure cooker: a boss from hell, coworkers who steal his ideas and sabotage him, and an assistant who flirts with everyone but lets rivals swoop in with his work. The place doubles as a storage room, adding a constant sense of clutter and chaos to his days. At home, the situation is equally tense: his younger sister, So Yee-Si, a compulsive gambler, and his mother, So Fa, who tries to pressure him into selling the home left to him by his late grandfather. The only bright spot in his world is his ditsy girlfriend, Bobo, Ivana Wong, whose buoyant optimism briefly lifts his spirits. His loyal friend Wah-Dee, Alex Fong Lik-Sun, tries to cheer him up, but often ends up making things more complicated.

On his birthday, the situation finally snaps when his boss, Rich Ma, Michael Wong, fires him for underperformance. In a frantic moment of desperation, So Boring accidentally kills his boss while begging for his job. As he frantically hides the body, an eerie text lights up his phone, asking, “> If you can delete those you don’t like what would it be?” He dismisses it as a prank, deletes the message, and wishes not for a killer boss, but for a nicer one.

Back at the office, the wish seems to come true in an almost magical way: his new boss is supremely kind, permissive, and endlessly accommodating, allowing parties and unlimited extended vacations. The “deleted to” boss is so generous that he even lets So Boring run the company. This strange power becomes a temptation, and So Boring begins to delete people who annoy him, trying to shape a smoother life.

The changes ripple outward in surprising and troubling ways. His once-chubby assistant becomes slim, his disgruntled mother and sister morph into more proper, cook-loving versions, and his best friend becomes a stand-in for a pop-culture fantasy (a pirated Iron Man Tony Stark). Even Bobo’s childhood friend wants to marry her, and a middle-aged man—with a heavy country accent—enters the picture. Then So Boring crosses a line he can’t uncross: he accidentally deletes Bobo into a flashy, sexually adventurous mainland girl.

As the deleted-to versions begin to reveal their own flaws, the consequences grow heavier. So Boring sees the negative side of these altered people: his deleted-to boss frames him when there’s a need to fire all the employees; his mother’s constant cooking becomes a repetitive loop; his girlfriend’s compliments turn into harassment of his closest ally; and a friend hints at a homosexual future with him that strains their bond.

Confronting the deleted-to boss, So Boring makes a daring wish to bring back his original boss. Miraculously, the original Rich Ma returns, but questions how So Boring knows how to delete people—after all, he himself had erased his original family years ago. As they ponder how to restore their true loved ones, the boss’s deleted-to wife overhears and informs her own “deleted-to” son and daughter. The family that has embraced its new forms decides against reversing the changes, planning to kill So Boring and his boss instead.

The two men narrowly escape death and pull a retro-style computer from the boss’s office to figure out how to undo the deletions. Their quest to restore the originals comes with a grim cost: bringing back the loved ones may require giving up everything they hold dear. The film closes with them racing toward an uncertain truth, weighing heartache against the chance to reclaim the people they truly love.