113 min | NR | March 6, 2020 | Film Movement
Zhou Zenong runs a crew of motorcycle thieves until a botched job leaves a cop dead and a bounty on his own head. A woman from the lake meets him in the dark with a plan he cannot read. Everyone in the city wants the reward, and the reward is him.
Zhou Zenong leads a gang of motorcycle thieves in the industrial sprawl outside Wuhan. A turf dispute turns into a shooting and he kills a police officer by accident. The city puts a bounty on his head and half the underworld lines up to collect it. Diao Yinan builds the whole film around a man worth more dead than alive. The real subject is a working class ground down by a city that treats people as inventory.
Hu Ge plays Zhou Zenong with stillness and dread. He moves like a man counting the hours he has left and finding no comfort in any of them. Gwei Lun-Mei plays Liu Aiai, a bathing-beauty sex worker sent to make contact with him, and she keeps her motives sealed behind a flat stare. The audience never knows whether she means to save him or hand him over. Liao Fan plays Captain Liu as a patient predator who runs the manhunt like a logistics problem. The three of them circle one another without ever trusting a word.
Diao Yinan writes and directs, and he films crime as pure sensation. The picture drowns its alleys and tenements in neon that turns every face green and red and sick. A nighttime killing arrives under a strobing umbrella, and the lighting chops the action into stuttering fragments. Diao stages violence with sudden inventiveness and a willingness to make weapons out of ordinary objects. The sound design leans on rain, motorcycle engines, and the wet hush of the lake after dark.
The plot runs on familiar machinery. Double crosses, a bounty, a doomed man, a woman whose loyalty stays in question. Diao knows the genre cold and treats it as a delivery system for mood rather than surprise. The pleasures here are textural. Light on wet pavement, the geography of a slum at night, the dead calm of people who have already lost. The film wants you to feel the trap more than solve it, and it closes that trap with style to spare.