Only the River Flows: wonderfully bizarre Chinese noir sets a murder investigation in an empty cinema
A police captain is sent to lead a murder case in a remote hamlet where the homicide unit is run from an old cinema in Wei Shujun’s absurdist crime drama.
The small-town murder probe remains a fertile subgenre in literature, film and TV, whether it’s novelist Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown (2021), or the Tasmanian devilry of Deadloch (2023-). No matter the continent, these backwater crime scenes tap into the insular and incestuous nature of rural life, the closely guarded secrets and the sometimes proudly held conviction that ‘society’ ends in the suburbs. Country folk look out for themselves.
These same conditions also prevail in the People’s Republic of China, it seems, judging by this febrile exercise in Sino-noir by Wei Shujun, an adaptation of a novella, Mistakes by the River, by Yu Hua (known for To Live, 1994). Wei made his mark with the award-winning short On the Border (2018) and his debut feature, the slacker comedy Striding into the Wind (2021), both official selections at Cannes. The latter – about a precocious film student on a professional shoot – nodded towards Jim Jarmusch and Jia Zhangke, and it’s easy to imagine both those filmmakers would be intrigued by his latest, which marries coded social critique with deadpan absurdism and a dark, cynical sensibility.
The locale certainly smacks of Jia: a derelict provincial headquarters that seems to crumble before our eyes, just a few years after Tiananmen Square, mired in rain and mud and murk. The opening sequence has a young boy playing cop, running through an abandoned building that is apparently being demolished beneath his feet. His grown-up counterpart, Captain Ma (a charismatic Zhu Yilong), is shortly thereafter dispatched by his ping-pong-playing superior to an empty cinema – no one goes any more, we’re told – to establish his homicide unit there. It’s a wonderfully bizarre conceit, the set dressing taking place before our eyes as desks, filing cabinets and potted plants – the props of every cop show – are rolled up on to the proscenium, perched before the empty screen. (Ma’s own office is appropriately situated in the projection booth.) It’s as if the investigation is a kind of ritual enactment, as performative as, well, a movie.
The river where the murders take place is further afield, beside a hamlet of just 50 homes, we’re told (there are less by the fade-out). The first victim is known to all as ‘Granny Four’; locals are quick to point the finger at a stray she had taken in and adopted, a near-mute individual the villagers refer to bluntly as “the madman”.
The murder itself – enacted, a bit confusingly, after the investigation has been established – is a slasher-cam shot à la De Palma, leaning on Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata for dreamy counterpoint. Three later scenes incorporate tingling cuts from Howard Shore’s slinky score for Crash (1996), which sounds random but feels of a piece as Ma’s investigation spirals into confusion.
In Jiangdong, like anywhere else, the authorities are quick to embrace the obvious: open and shut is the order of the day, and Ma’s fussing over extraneous clues is just unwelcome baggage. The honour of the department is at stake, and Ma’s misgivings about pinning the crimes on such a convenient culprit make no sense to anyone else.
It’s also inarguable that the inconvenient truths Ma unearths – a secret love affair between a young woman and a local poetry teacher; and the sexuality of another suspect, a closeted hairdresser who immediately confesses to the killings – only make things worse for all concerned. These, along with a subplot involving Ma’s pregnant wife and concerns for the health of the foetus, point to aspects of life in China that everyone prefers to sweep beneath the carpet.
Ma is not impervious to these pressures. And as the death toll multiplies alarmingly he is forced to doubt himself – and we must too. Despite his hard-won integrity, empathy and imagination, or possibly because of them, he’s ultimately an unreliable detective.
Despite the film’s absurdist streak, there’s no mistaking its subversive edge, and comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003) and Mother (2009) are clearly on point; not least for the expert blocking and director of photography’s Chengma’s sly and insidious compositional sense, always hinting at a larger frame frustratingly out of reach. The movie’s pièce de résistance is an extended dream sequence which unspools like a roll of film unravelling to the floor, images that have fallen awry. The truth is not only elusive but actively dangerous. In order to preserve his sanity Ma is forced to make peace with dead ends at every turn.
► Only the River Flows is In UK cinemas from 16 August.