This analogue noir set in central China evokes satisfying memories of Bong Joon-ho’s great Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder.
It’s Jiangdong province, 1995. An elderly lady has been found brutally murdered on the banks of a small town’s slow-moving river. Detective Ma (Yilong Zhu) and his willing but gormless sidekick are soon sifting through possible suspects: a local man with learning difficulties, a hairdresser who seems weirdly keen to hand himself in, or maybe some other malevolent figure. A cassette tape leads them to a young woman and her illicit partner. Maybe they hold the answer?
Played by the leather-jacketed Zhu, 36 years old but carrying himself like a world-weary fortysomething, Ma is a jaded sleuth in the best noirish mode: all tired eyes and the faint sense that he’s three or four murder cases past his best.
That applies to the police force as a whole, led by a ping-pong-obsessed chief who cranks up the pressure on Ma while rattling on vaguely about ‘collective honour’. Director Wei Shujun brings a subtly satirical lens to all this small-time hubris: the older lady is ‘Granny Four’; the river bank lurker is dubbed ‘Madman’ – lazy nicknames that betray a slapdash methodology.
It evokes Bong Joon-ho’s great crime thriller Memories of Murder
Near-constant rain backdrops a serial-killer procedural that also evokes David Fincher’s Seven. The killer is two steps ahead, even as Ma spirals into a madness of his own. Early in the piece, his small team is exiled to the local cinema, converted into an improvised HQ for the investigation, and Shujun exploits that liminal space with Lynchian playfulness. At one point, Ma dreams his own crime thriller from the stalls.
Filmed on scratchy 16mm and with cinematographer Chengma Zhiyuan’s terrific lighting throwing shadows over its shady ensemble, it’s a great-looking noir too. The pre-cellphone, pre-internet setting is a satisfying time capsule back to an era when on-screen detectives worked on hunches and their wits. In this enigmatic tale, they may not be enough.
In UK cinemas now.