Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Murder is a global language, and the world still loves film noir. Both points are well made in heady Chinese cop opera Only The River Flows, in which the darkness of night is broken only by police torches while shadows outdo the sun. The year is 1995, in a fictional provincial city. Skyscrapers have not yet arrived, but the bulldozers are already here. And the case at the heart of the story falls to chain-smoking police detective Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong), poring over cassette tapes.The crime takes place in riverside outskirts: an elderly woman found killed. A hulking loner seems the likely culprit. But guilt this obvious is rarely the whole story. Sure enough, Ma Zhe’s investigation drifts elsewhere. Among neighbours, there are many secrets. Then another body turns up.Habit leads us to expect a Holmesian eureka. Adapting Yu Hua’s novel Mistakes By The River, director Wei Shujun takes another tack. Here, not every question mark resolves into a neat full stop. Factual fuzzy edges tip Ma Zhe into obsession. A clue to the mood of the film comes as his investigation is given the run of a disused movie theatre.Fittingly, as pure cinema, Only The River Flows is a knockout: eerie and dreamlike. An overture of kids at play is a marvel. Another scene is a dead ringer for gaudy maestro Brian De Palma. And, oh: it never stops raining.But Wei also tethers his film to everyday realities. China’s former one-child policy takes a key supporting role. If the movie is a philosophy lesson in unknowable truth, it also has cynical police chiefs who just want someone locked up fast.Released in China last year, the film became a domestic box-office smash: no minor feat for an art-house movie shot on 16mm film that opens with a quote from Albert Camus. In the west, it might be tempting to see crowds flocking subversively to a portrait of flawed authority. But those flaws are safely three decades in the past. Anyway, a simpler pleasure may well have been more influential. Having seen the movie, Chinese audiences then thronged social media to debate the plot, a modern forum for an age-old question. No, but seriously, whodunnit?★★★★☆In UK cinemas from August 16
