The Looming Storm

The end of the nineties, a provincial city in China. Yu is a security guard at a factory. He is meticulous, has been given an award at work and thinks of himself as a detective. Women are being killed in the city and the police get nowhere. Yu takes up the investigation himself. He gathers evidence, follows a trail and takes the file he has kept to the police. In the same period the factory closes; state enterprises are being privatised and thousands lose their work. Yu carries both things at once. Dong Yue directs. Duan Yihong plays Yu. It is the director's first feature. Duan Yihong won the best actor award at the Tokyo Film Festival for the part. The background is a real period: the closure of state factories in China at the end of the nineties caused large scale unemployment and was often treated in cinema. The murder strand reaches no solution; the narrative deliberately does not meet the expectation of a crime film. The rain does not stop through the film and the locations are constantly wet; the visual register is its strongest side. The real matter is a duty a man gives himself; Yu does a job nobody asked of him and pays for it. The ending comes through a scene set earlier and changes the narrative's arrangement of time. Who it is for: viewers who like Chinese independent cinema and dark crime narratives. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the murder plot is not resolved, and the register is bleak.