Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Only the River Flows essay contains spoilers. Wei Shujun’s 2023 film features Yilong Zhu, Chloe Maayan and Tianlai Hou. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

In the first scene of Only the River Flows, a group of kids in cop uniforms play in an abandoned government building. As they run around, one of them opens a door which leads to a sheer drop into the rubble below: a section of the building has already been torn down, and the boy stands there staring at the abyss, with diggers below. Wei Shujun’s 2023 film follows detective Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) as he works a puzzling series of murders in rural China. The aforementioned child playing dress-up staring at empty space is an apt opening image for an ambiguous, shadow-drenched noir.

Another such startling image emerges early in the plot: the local movie theater has closed down, and the chief of police (Hou Tianlai) orders Ma to conduct his investigation from the empty auditorium. As cause-and-effect in the case spin out of control, so too does Ma’s grip on reality, with the movie theater functioning as the nexus of his nightmarish dreaming. The first murder involves that of an elderly lady found by the river bank, with suspicion quickly falling on her adopted son, labeled by authorities as “the madman” (Kang Chunlei). As more bodies appear, the police chief urges Ma to close the case, but the detective never seems fully convinced by the facts. As the protagonist loses himself in the details, he dredges up memories and pieces them together in incoherent ways, trying to find one narrative that fits. Nothing ever quite coheres — details forever washed away by the rain.

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Only the River Flows is deliberately muddy, probably to the point of frustration for some viewers, but this total ambiguity is a boon. I first watched the film last year at a festival; during a recent rewatch, I became convinced that the movie has since been recut or even censored. The Chinese government requires pre-approved permits of all national films before they are screened publicly (even if said film is screening at international festivals), and it’s not uncommon that previously-approved productions have to come back for extra cuts. It would not be beyond possibility that such a film was struck by the censors. 

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But alas, my own memories are unreliable. I conflated a key plot point with Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, which I had re-watched not long after Only the River Flows (also for this column, incidentally). The similarities between the two films are many: aside from cases that drive the respective detectives crazy, both productions take place in the recent past in rainy areas of the rural Far East. Music provides a key clue in both procedurals, a developmentally-challenged local becomes a key suspect, local bureaucratic incompetency hampers both investigations… the list goes on. No wonder I transplanted memories of one film onto another and told myself my own story. It’s appropriate to Only the River Flows, which is about how narratives converge and muddle; when they don’t fit, they drive us crazy.

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These similarities go beyond just the obvious but are integral to the postmodern positioning of Only the River Flows. The film is, however, not a postmodernist work of winking irony and remixing, but a postmodernist production of sincerity and contemporaneity, one which looks to the past as a way of trying to understand the present.

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To that end, Only the River Flows and the investigation it centers on is drenched in analogue effects and ephemera. The movie was captured on 16mm by cinematographer Chengma Zhiyuan, apparently the first mainland Chinese film in years to be shot on film, and it looks astounding. The grain adds to the rainy, foggy feel of the central location, with a hazy and evocative use of color and gorgeous shadowing derived from a seemingly never-ending supply of low-hanging light fixtures and cigarettes. Few modern films have looked this beautiful and completely noir. In the plot itself, physical objects prove more useful to the investigation than the standard methods of police procedurals like interrogations and fingerprints. A cassette tape, a makeup bag, the amount of bullets left in a pistol magazine — these objects are crucial: they can be touched and felt. Ma intimately cradles each one at various points.

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And yet, the physicality of these objects, and their reality, never amounts to anything concrete as far as the murder investigation goes. They are, in the end, only objects, given meaning by the circumstantial context around them. The meaning of the cassette tape is based on its contents. The meaning of the makeup is based on the owner. The meaning of the gun is based on who fired it. One of the challenges the director faces is to ask what happens to the noir mystery once these links are severed. The answer is perhaps pure memory, pure conjecture, pure guesswork.

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Amidst all that is the presence of Only the River Flows’ central location — a nondescript, post-industrial town somewhere in rural China. The river is the region’s landmark, the site of the film’s murders. Is its presence there to wash away the sins? Only the River Flows hints at bureaucratic incompetency — again, my memory of my initial watch included more scenes about poor governance. Have I misremembered again? Ma’s boss is focused more on personal glory, judged by how many crimes his division solves, regardless of whether they solve them correctly, as well as his own table tennis prowess in the local leagues. “Stick to the facts!” the police chief says in a key scene as he admonishes Ma for a report where the detective points out that all he’s done is lay out the evidence as he sees it. In Only the River Flows, facts and evidence become fractured, washed away by the rain and a river.

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Over and over again, Only the River Flows returns to the idea of the fallibility of truth, the fragmentary nature of evidence and our own ability to warp our own memories to suit our own narrative. Linked to incompetent state officials in an otherwise controlling, authoritarian state, the film transforms into a drama about who owns what stories, and from which grounds they do so. The tipping point for Ma’s state of mind emerges around the movie’s mid-point, as he falls asleep in an empty cinema (like so many of us) and dreams an entirely different conclusion to the case, driven by a projector that burns up. Like many great crime films, Only the River Flows makes full use of its setting, delivering a grimy and ugly story that suits its grimy and ugly central location. But it finds something else in the mud by the riverbanks too — a realization that these narratives of murder and misery very rarely lead anywhere for their protagonists, who become caught in fictions of both their and our making.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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