Only the River Flows review – accomplished Chinese noir is intriguing and ingenious thriller

Wei Shujun’s new film, adapted from a novella by Yu Hua, is a deadpan existential riddle presenting as noir crime, set in provincial China and taking its cue from Albert Camus’s Caligula: “There’s no understanding fate, therefore I choose to play the part of fate …” It’s a movie that wryly questions the thriller genre’s assumptions about the essential knowability of motive and agency; the idea that people commit crimes for clear reasons and their means and opportunity are governed by the equally explicable conditions of the physical world. But in this drama, chaos and meaninglessness keep peeping through – I can imagine David Lynch directing an alternative version. (There is also the plot-muddle tradition of classic Hollywood noir that sometimes uses China as a somewhat racist trope for exotically opaque murkiness, as in The Lady from Shanghai or Chinatown.)

Zhu Yilong plays Captain Ma, a smart and ambitious young officer brought in to solve the murder of a woman whose corpse has been found by a riverbank, and his superiors set up an incident centre in – of all the postmodern places – a disused cinema. Interrogations take place in the projection room, as two more people are killed and a secondary suspect takes his own life. Overworked Capt Ma falls asleep at one stage and his dreams about the crimes are projected on to the screen; later events may or may not be more cinematic dreams or hallucinations.

Before her murder, the woman appeared to have adopted a learning-disabled man brusquely nicknamed “madman”, who is of course prime suspect, and whose madness, and mysterious ability to escape from the mental hospital after being caught, provides a kind of narrative cover for the crazy arbitrariness of the subsequent deaths. Ma’s superiors are happy to wrap the case up with the madman’s irrational choice of victims; Ma tortures himself with the thought there’s something more to it.

As for Ma himself, he is very stressed by his wife’s pregnancy and by the fact that his child may have a birth defect, heartlessly announced by the doctor. Having a baby, the ultimate cause-and-effect activity, is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Finally, Ma has what his superiors consider to be a breakdown, claiming to have shot the madman dead in a dark alley, an event that cannot be verified.

I can’t however rid myself of the suspicion that a noir that does in fact have a conventionally structured plot can offer just as much commentary on the human condition, while also providing the pleasures of an ingenious thriller. But this film is an intriguing and well-made diversion, a puzzle whose missing pieces make a disquieting pattern.

• Only the River Flows is in UK and Irish cinemas from 16 August.