Only The River Flows – a rainswept police procedural that is muddy rather than noir (Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 22 August)

Only The River Flows is a police procedural film with a difference from Chinese director Wei Shujun.

It’s 1995, and detective Ma Zhe (Yilong Zhu) begins to investigate a murder on the banks of a river. Like all good screen detectives, he has a distinctive non-police issue uniform, a black leather jacket. The weather is dirty – a perfect film to watch during a wet Irish summer – and soon the suspects’ bodies begin to mount up as one death turns to many. (The last film with this much rain was Parasite.)

The investigation runs in parallel with the audience’s exploration of the somewhat dysfunctional police department. The big boss is better at playing ping pong than delivering motivational speeches with any meaning. A former ‘cultural bureau’ – a theatre space with a cinema screen – has fallen into disrepair and he sends Ma Zhe and his team over to set up their office on the stage.

The level of forensic expertise is low in the region: they use different blades to cut pig flesh to see which most closely matches the neck of a murder victim. The lack of training, or lack of backup, is almost comical. The intense pressure for everyone to submit merit applications – it’s almost more important than getting to the bottom of the series of murders – creates yet more uncertainty about the mentality of the police leaders.

Watching a film about an investigation on a stage with a cinema screen creates a meta narrative that asks whether reality can be stranger than fiction. A jigsaw puzzle is another visual metaphor. A missing merit certificate sits alongside missing motives and a missing murderer. Shot on 16mm film, the colours are dull and the images vary in sharpness. The older feel contributes to the sense of 1990s and the weather. The sophisticated sound track is a creative success: listen out for the geese.

Ultimately the flippancy of some of Ma Zhe’s colleagues, along with his chief’s desire to bask in everyone else’s success creates the potential for a very watchable film. Only The River Flows is let down by its ending. All the way through Ma Zhe has avoided every easy answer. “Arrest me and you’re done” cries one suspect who it seems was certainly not the culprit. While Ma Zhe ends up suffering an existential crisis at home and at work, the film’s conclusion felt incredibly rushed and muddied. As the end credits rolled, I had no idea whodunit, and I’d no desire to go back a second time to find out. Which is a shame as Wei Shujun’s film started out with a lot of promise, and you may find you better connect with it if you catching a screening.

Only The River Flows is being shown at Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 22 August.

 

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!