Review | Cannes 2023: Only the River Flows movie review – Chinese neo-noir makes a triumphant comeback with Wei Shujun’s dazzling murder mystery
- Wei Shujun’s adaptation of Yu Hua’s short story about a detective faced with a small-town murder breaks a recent run of disappointing Chinese neo-noir movies
- Vividly shot with increasingly surreal imagery as Zhu Yilong’s protagonist unravels, the film’s meaning is debatable, unlike the status of Wei as a great auteur
4/5 stars
Once a trailblazing and taboo-smashing genre that set the international film festival circuit alight, Chinese neo-noir has yielded increasingly diminishing returns in recent years. Fatalist films probing the country’s dark underbelly have largely been replaced by overblown spectacles in which style trumps substance.
Only the River Flows is poised to buck that trend. An adaptation of Yu Hua’s absurdist short story from 1987, Wei Shujun’s third feature offers a mix of dead-end detective work, doomed characters and surreal dreamscapes.
Only the River Flows is set in a grey, provincial China in the 1990s, an era brought vividly to life through digital camerawork and footage shot on 16mm film stock. The story revolves around the discovery of the corpse of an old woman in a waterside clearing in a small town.
While everything points to a local madman (Kang Chunlei) as the culprit, the ultra-diligent case officer Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) sees something amiss in the seemingly watertight evidence and effortless arrest of the suspect.
