Only The River Flows ★★★★★

Released: 16 August 2024

Director: Wei Shujun

Starring: Zhu Yilong, Chloe Maayan, Chou Yu, Kang Chunlei, Tianlai Hou

Review By: Avanish Chandrasekaran

Wei Shujun is an emerging, exciting new voice among China’s latest filmmaking generation in the past couple of years. Having proved his mettle as an auteur thanks to films like Striding Into The Wind (2020) and Ripples Of Life (2021), Wei turns his gaze at the procedural murder mystery with Only The River Flows, proceeding to challenge the tropes traditionally associated with the genre. The result is typical of Wei’s filmography so far—an engaging examination of societal dynamics in the guise of a genre film.

The film is based on Mistakes By The River, a novella by Yu Hua. It is 1995 in provincial China. Ma Zhe (an impressive Zhu Yilong) is a young policeman leading an investigation into the murder of an old woman whose body has been found by a river bank. Prima facie, no foul motive can be ascertained, barring the fact that she had taken in a mentally challenged man (Kang Chunlei)—tersely called “madman” by the locals— following her husband’s death. Other baffling leads spring up, like a tale of forbidden love between a poetry professor and a local girl recorded over a music cassette found at the crime scene, a barber formerly convicted of indecency for cross-dressing and the subsequent, mysterious deaths of suspects. The film follows Ma as he attempts to solve the case while dealing with overwork, alcoholic stupor, clerical commitments and the pregnancy of his wife (Chloe Maayan).

Wei prologues the film with a quote from Albert Camus- “There’s no understanding of fate therefore I choose to be part of fate.” It effectively junks reason in favour of absurdism. At the film’s outset, the town’s police headquarters are relocated to a disused cinema. The main stage becomes the main office, and in true absurdist fashion, pig carcasses are hacked with different types of blades to ascertain the nature of the murder weapon. Wei uses the setting of the cinema to tip a hat to the medium, giving a nod to his two previous films which also revolved around the world of cinema and filmmaking.

Filmed on grainy 16 mm by cinematographer Chengma Zhiyuan. Wei soaks the film in cold hues, giving it a mysterious atmosphere. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata acts as a musical motif, only adding to the sombre nature of the proceedings. In Wei’s hands, Ma’s mental state is reflected in the twisted nature of the case he is solving, causing him to have an idiosyncratic vision of the society he is inhabiting. While Ma struggles to find logical clues to investigate the series of deaths following the old woman’s murder, his superior (Tianlai Hou) is committed to shutting the case quickly, seeming more interested in playing ping-pong and acquiring the evaluation forms of his underlings. Overwork and mild alcoholism cause Ma to have a hallucinatory dream wherein he sees the deaths played out in the screen of the cinema he is operating out of. The madman taken in by the old woman is detained as a prime suspect at a mental hospital, but he miraculously escapes custody. The deaths are attributed to the madman, but no clear motive can be established. The queer barber openly confesses to committing the murder, but no evidence links him to the crime. Ma claims to his superior to have shot the madman in an alleyway, but all the bullets in his gun’s magazine remain intact. Closer home, Ma’s unborn child is at the risk of having mental defects. So consumed he is by his work that he presumably makes associations with the case’s madman and suggests that the child be aborted, eliciting wild protestations from his wife.  

Wei weaves all these ambiguities into a tight knot rather than into a clear tapestry wherein every thread of the case is visible. However, these threads are interestingly ambiguous which leave us as the audience scrambling for possible theories. By doing so, Wei is cocking a snoot at the police procedural genre by upending one of its key elements—the presence of a clear motive. While we keep searching for answers, it is safe to assume Wei may be satisfied at dismantling the conventions of a genre so innovatively and effectively.