Only the River Flows

15

The new film from prolific writer-director Wei Shujun – following 2020’s Striding Into the Wind and 2021’s Ripples of Life, both shown at Cannes – is a stylish, structurally inventive neo-noir with a pitch-black sense of humour, adapted from a novella by writer Yu Hua.

1990s, Banpo Town, rural China: a woman’s body is found by the river. Dedicated detective Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) is assigned to head up the case, which leads to an obvious arrest. His superiors are pleased, but Ma wants to delve deeper. Witnesses and suspects multiply and confuse while further crimes take place, and Ma’s grip on reality within this rich, labyrinthine maze of clues begins to falter.

Drawing us inexorably into its seamy, offbeat mysteries, Only the River Flows is sly and witty, a film that riffs on genre while seeking to explore multiple ideas – about human behaviour and the interplay of circumstance and character, about the stagnation of small-town life, about cinema and the act of storytelling itself. Shot in grimy, grainy tones, deploying elements of surrealism, it’s a playful, unusual and wonderfully mysterious psychological journey.