'Only the River Flows' washes away detective movie cliches

Grim neo-noir is like 'Zodiac' set in a small Chinese town.

“Only The River Flows” opens with a little boy dressed as a policeman, chasing his friends through the hallways of a derelict apartment building. Shouting and hunting around, he opens door after door looking for his friends – until he opens one door and finds himself gazing out through the ruins of the building into the wide world beyond.

The game of hide-and-seek mirrors the murder investigation in Chinese director Wei Shujun’s haunting neo-noir “Only the River Flows.” Much of the film plays like a straight police procedural, as dogged detective Ma Zhe (Yilong Zhu) hunts for a murderer in a small town. But the elusive trail of clues may lead him to something much bigger than he bargained for.

The film takes place in the 1990s, and Wei shoots the film on 16mm so it feels like an artifact from that time. The town that Ma Zhe is stationed in is dying, the Chinese government tearing it down for something new in the name of progress, and the film has a gritty, rainy air of desolation and ruin. 

The police station even has to relocate operations inside the town’s abandoned movie theater, reinforcing the idea of police work as playacting and performance that we saw with the little boy. “No one goes anymore,” someone says of the movie theater, a sly in-joke with the audience that taps into the film’s surprising vein of black humor.

Ma Zhe is tasked with finding out who killed a local woman, referred to only as Granny Four, at the edge of the river near town. Suspicion immediately falls on a homeless man who Granny Four took in as a boarder. That the man was nicknamed “Madman” by the locals seems to seal his fate, and Ma Zhe’s superiors want the case wrapped up neatly and quickly.

But other clues suggest other paths, including a mixtape found near the body that contains a hidden message. Ma Zhe’s investigation leads him to more suspects, more confessions, and more bodies, although it’s never clear whether these developments connect back to the original murder. 

“One trail goes cold, a new one appears right away,” Ma Zhe’s partner says, and the investigation starts to feel like an existential curse, with Ma Zhe doomed to keep chasing elusive shadows, unable to close the case and unable to let it go. Madman appears and disappears on screen, just out of reach of the detective, including in an unsettling dream sequence that includes a re-enactment of the murder shot from the killer’s POV.

“Only The River Flows” reminded me of David Fincher’s “Zodiac” in the way it provides both the thrill of a police procedural while denying us the catharsis of a resolution. Or, at least, the answers provided aren’t about who killed who, but about the saddest, darkest corners of the human condition.

“Only the River Flows” has its Madison premiere at 7 p.m. Thursday at the UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall.