Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)
Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows is a throwback to films like Zodiac, Memories of Murder, and especially Cure, where a mysterious, unsolvable murder reveals pervasive societal malaise. The murder that drives the plot concerns an elderly woman is killed near a river-bank, and a man simply known as “the madman” becomes the scapegoat. Ma Zhe, the taciturn detective at the center of the film, believes that the real killer is still at large, sending him into a hallucinatory, paranoid spiral. A rising star of the police force and an expectant father, his meltdown threatens the stability of his personal and professional life.
Shot in 16mm, with a satellite police station setup inside an abandoned movie theater, Wei’s innovation on this well-trodden genre is a timely commentary on the conflict between reality and state-sanctioned truth, cleverly sublimated within the film’s meta-cinematic gestures. While the police station proper has its own cursed decorations questioning the value of reality, the mesmeric unreality of cinema becomes a rupture for Ma Zhe, who spends his nights watching projected images of the crime scene. The film slowly unravels, perhaps as a result of these sleepless cinematic nocturnes, as Ma Zhe imagines encounters with “the madman”, his history as a decorated police officer in another province comes into question, and ambiguities emerge in his family life (such as the completion of a sabotaged puzzle). Ma Zhe, who is instructed by his wife to stay in police uniform throughout a prenatal photoshoot, is a man whose mind has begun to revolt against the orthodoxy of his surroundings. Wei’s distinct filmic textures, and his adherence to specific genre tropes ultimately become thematically relevant formal choices, adding layers of doubt to the film’s surfaces. When a conclusive dream sequence ends with strips of film reel, Wei makes his intentions to investigate acceptable imagery of Chinese society abundantly clear.
Only the River Flows played at SIFF from September 14-15 and is coming soon to VOD.