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Ho Wi Ding’s noir-tinged triptych details three nights in the life of troubled Taiwan police detective Zhang Dong Ling, as his turbulent personal life repeatedly triggers eruptions of murderous violence. Winner of the Platform Prize at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Cities of Last Things is an imperfect but consistently intriguing new work from the director of Beautiful Accident, Pinoy Sunday and Respire. Opening in a near-future setting, each of the film’s subsequent segments jumps further back in time, offering more explanation as to Zhang’s personality and behaviour. He is also portrayed by a different actor in each chapter, respectively Jack Kao, Lee Hong Chi and Hsieh Chang Ying, each of whom puts a new spin on the character while retaining his tortured...

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The peppy exhortation to “live every moment as if it were your last” has always been a source of annoyance, not least because it’s so redundant: Every moment we experience is our last — as in, the latest in a long line of moments that terminates in the present with only the chirruping crickets of an unknown future ahead. With his fifth feature, Malaysian-born Taiwanese filmmaker Ho Wi Ding has basically made a hymn to that observation, in the form of the seamy, secretive, sorrowful “Cities of Last Things” — winner of the Toronto film festival’s juried Platform section — a fatalistic film noir that uses a non-chronological structure to invoke the elusive idea that every encounter is an abandonment and that all we are is the sum total of all those last things.

And so it begins with an end — while an incongruously cheerful, old-fashioned Chinese doo-wop song plays, a...