Only the River Flows

The new film from prolific writer-director Wei Shujun is a stylish, structurally inventive neo-noir with a pitch-black sense of humour, adapted from a short story by postmodernist writer Yu Hua. 

1990s, Banpo town, rural China: a woman’s body is found by the river. Dedicated detective (and expectant father) Ma Zhe 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 in to its seamy, offbeat mysteries, Only the River Flows is sly and witty; a film that riffs on genre while seeking to explore divergent 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.