Black Coal, Thin Ice (Yi’nan Diao, 2014): China

Reviewed by Phill Hunziker, Viewed at the Metro 4 Theatre, part of the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2015.

 I haven’t left a theater feeling so internally polarized since I soaked in the trainwreck/masterpiece known as Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. While this film isn’t in that same category of eloquent absurdity, it surely has a similar effect. I remained in my seat for an extra ten minutes trying to process what exactly I had just seen. After leaving the theater, I took a peek in the basket containing the audience reviews. They were either a 1 or 5, nothing in between. I, myself, caved and gave it a deserving 5. No other film in the festival stuck in my head to this extent; that deserves positive recognition.

The story starts as Zhang Zili (Liao Fan), a detective fresh off receiving his divorce papers, investigates a murder in which dismembered limbs are scattered across the entire province through coal shipments. Five years after no culprit is found, another similar series of murders springs up. In an attempt to solve this once and for all, he closely follows Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun-Mei), a dry cleaner clerk who is linked to every victim.

The plot contains so many twists and turns, so many connections between characters and events that it could have been so easy for it to become a convoluted mess. Thanks to savvy directing and still camera usage, it stays its course up to the very ending. However, It was quite a maddening film. There was an uneven tone, stiff characters a multiple accounts of borderline sexual assault that were treated so casually. Yet, I found myself falling in love with that same unique tone and those cold, heavy characters. ‘Well acted’ doesn’t do it justice.

The script would fall flat if not for the chilling delivery. Had the acting been even just par, each line would have been stale. This partially could be due to the never-fully-smooth subtitle translations, however. Even so, it seems that the script relies almost too heavily on every other aspect (acting, camera angles, sound, editing, etc.) that if one of them falters even slightly, which happened a few times, the scene is in danger of being completely thrown off. That’s not to say the script doesn’t have its moments. There are some solid one-liners (“But memories, good or bad, never fade”) and, as mentioned above, the story never feels over-stuffed or that it has lost its way.

The long, intense periods of silence and cold delivery truly make the film. It would have been less frustrating if they weren’t offset by the almost random scene transitions. It seemed that, at times, there would be 15-20 minutes of solid filmmaking, then all of a sudden there would be an ugly cut that would completely throw me out of the story. The editing was the weakest part of the film and the core of many of my frustrations with it.

It really is a polarizing film; one that is definitely not for everybody. Multiple viewings are required to fully absorb this crime/drama/mystery/thriller/mindblower.