Murder in 405

A murder investigation that looks at first to be limited to a single event uncovers a much wider arrangement. As those conducting it go on, they see that behind the event stand more than one person and ties that protect one another. The film belongs to the period in the early eighties when the detective genre came back to life in Chinese cinema; while building its puzzle it also looks at how institutions work. The account is interested less in the question of who the killer is than in what stands in the way of finding the truth. The account gives the steps of the investigation in order and leaves the viewer room to build a guess of their own. Zhong Xinghuo appears in Shen Yaoting’s hundred and two minute Chinese film, completed in 1980.