Only The River Flows (PG13)

101 minutes, opens on Jan 25 at The Projector

4 stars

The story: It is 1995 in China. In a village, by the river, the corpse of an older woman is discovered. Local police chief Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) comes to investigate. As his search for the killer goes on, his sense of disquiet grows, leading to doubts about not just the murder, but his entire existence. This film was nominated for an award in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Existential cops – they brood. The burden of the world sits on their shoulders, a pressure relieved by drink and cigarettes. They feel the foundations of reality shifting beneath them as they dig into crimes committed without motive or meaning.

Add Zhu’s Ma Zhe to the list of detectives rattled to their core by baffling acts of violence. He joins cops such as Peter Yu’s Lok in A Land Imagined (2018) and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki in Prisoners (2013): souls drawn to the edge of the void, their eyes fixed on the darkness below.

Beijing-born director and co-writer Wei Shujun’s third feature is remarkably self-assured for a film-maker who has never done a crime drama, much less one that features an unreliable narrator. His first feature, Striding Into The Wind (2020), is a road movie and his second, Ripples Of Life (2021), is a small-town drama.

He has adapted the conventions of the noir detective story for rural China in the 1990s without making it feel forced.

The death of a poor, elderly goose farmer is, in the eyes of regional political leaders, a matter that should be disposed of by any means necessary. The detective’s superiors pressure him to find someone to hang for the crime to keep the records spotless. His moral and political compasses spin wildly as a result.

Hairstyles and clothes are still somewhat uniform in that time period, so anyone with a slightly irregular look is easily identifiable. Anyone who defies the norm in fashion and sexual behaviour must harbour criminal tendencies, according to the established beliefs that surround the cop.

In cinema, the traditional noir setting favours dense cities or rain-drenched cyberpunk streets, but Wei makes his villages and factories look as grim and gloomy as any New York alley.

Because of the rustic Asian setting, there is a surface resemblance to South Korean crime classics such as Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009) and Memories Of Murder (2003).

In those films, the deepest questions are about the nature of evil. In this story, however, the most profound discoveries are to be found in the realms of identity, memory and forgetting.

Hot take: This dive into the psyche of a troubled cop in rural 1990s China is a well-paced and compelling addition to the library of noir detective stories.