A weary police captain (Zhu Yilong) battles insomnia and a killer on the loose in Wei Shujun’s gritty noir drama. Here’s our Only The River Flows review.
In 1995 China, the semi-rural Jiangdong province isn’t having the best winter.
The old cinema is closing (“nobody goes nowadays”, apparently); the rain alternates between torrential and mild drizzle; and an old woman – known locally as “Granny Four” – just turned up dead.
Meanwhile, police captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) is having his own problems. He works late, arriving home to find his pregnant wife asleep over a jigsaw puzzle, and his new office on the top floor of the defunct cinema overlooks a sea of broken roof tiles and not much else. He’s just the kind of miserable sod you want to solve a murder.
Beautifully shot on 16mm film, Only The River Flows might be set in the nineties, but its rugged feel and delightfully old-fashioned presentation would often look more at home a decade or two earlier. Everything from the sparse use of score (most commonly Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, oddly) to the particularly percussive sound design point towards a film not so much tipping its hat to its noir roots as copying them outright.
But Shujun’s understanding of the genre seems more than skin-deep. There’s a relentless melancholy to the film which helps it transcend the more predictable routes the plot takes it down. Even what on the page looks like an anachronistically optimistic ending feels somehow blunted by everything that’s come before, managing at times to be both thoroughly miserable and surprisingly empathetic towards the usual cast of suspects and victims the taciturn Ma Zhe meets along his way.
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The result is a film that’s surprisingly difficult to pin down. Largely conventional but with a depth that makes you think it’s anything but, Only The River Flows might not quite stand up to some of the modern masterpieces of the genre – but its achingly pretty tribute to the type of film it so closely mimics remains a compelling watch nonetheless.
Only The River Flows arrives in UK and Irish cinemas from 16th August.
