{"id":79169,"date":"2026-05-06T10:05:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T02:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=79169"},"modified":"2026-05-06T10:05:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T02:05:21","slug":"only-the-river-flows-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=79169","title":{"rendered":"Only the River Flows (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It feels like Chinese cinema is on a roll in producing neo-noir crime films, or at least ones that share similar vibes. Only the River Flows<\/em> is set up like a textbook murder mystery set in a rural town in 1995. But despite the lead detective’s diligence in following the clues step by step, the case defies all logical explanation until we begin to question if this is really a murder mystery after all. It’s no real spoiler to say that this one of those mind-bending films in which nothing is as it seems. It looks fantastic, the abstract themes are at least worth thinking about and yet in the end I feel cheated out of a perfectly good police procedural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In 1995, Ma Zhe is a police detective in Hunan province. Fre budgetary reasons, his entire team is forced to work out of a disused cinema. They respond to a report of a dead body found by the side of a river, an elderly woman killed using some manner of sharp tool. There is an obvious suspect, a grown, mentally impaired man who lives with the old woman. The police are unable to identify him. The villagers report that he only started living with her several years and is not a relative. From a woman’s handbag left on the riverbank, Ma Zhe tracks down other people who were there at around the same time including a female factory worker in an illicit relationship with a man and a male hairdresser who is hiding a secret. Yet frustratingly none of them appear to have anything to do with the original murder and one by one, they start dying as well, all by the side of the river. As the investigation proceeds and Ma Zhe is increasingly harried both by the case and worries that his currently pregnant wife might deliver a child with birth defects. There are numerous clues that Ma Zhe himself is not a reliable narrator as he may have memory issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a good, long while, this film gives every indication of being a solid police procedural. From a cassette tape found in the handbag, he identifies the recorded background noise of trains to a specific factory. His team hangs up pig carcasses and strikes them with a variety of implements to determine the murder weapon. The detective work is methodical and the deductive steps taken logical. The twist here is that in the end, it just doesn’t matter. He uncovers secrets only to learn that the only common factor is the riverbank itself. His superior officer pressures him to simply blame everything on the madman and be done with it. He resists as the madman appears harmless and even when the madman is caught literally red-handed, comes to believe that it is too convenient and that there must be some larger conspiracy at play. Even then, we the audience suppose that there will surely be an explanation at the end, but instead the film deliberately frustrates us. Ma Zhe’s rationality descends into dream logic. His memories fail him, at first in subtle ways and later wholesale. The entire film then transforms into an indictment against using logic to attempt to solve the case at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That intuition and emotions win out over rationality in an investigation is an idea at least as old as Twin Peaks<\/em>. But the rain-slicked alleys of rural China are a world away from the dreamy pine-covered landscape of the Pacific Northwest and Ma Zhe is a team player rather than a lone wolf. He wants the case to make sense but in between the pressures of his superiors to expeditiously close it, his domestic problems and his deteriorating mental state, he doesn’t know what the truth is any longer. I’ve read commentary that it’s meant as a subtle indictment of the Chinese system and its tendency to blame crimes on desirable elements in society. Perhaps that is one layer to it, but I find it revealing that the madman himself is a non-entity. He is unnamed and the police make no effort to find out his real identity or where he came from. This case was never solvable in the first place. The film itself seems to be mocking the attempt to apply rationality to explain the inexplicable flows of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love the look of this film and many have pointed out that this seems to be a spiritual successor to Memories of Murder<\/em>. But I believe that its elusiveness to being pinned down to any firm interpretation is a kind of dodge. It’s thought-provoking and surfaces plenty of ideas but there is no deep vision there and for that reason, I wouldn’t consider this to be among my favorites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It feels like Chinese cinema is on a roll in producing neo-noir crime films, or at least ones that share similar vibes. Only the River Flows is set up like a textbook murder mystery set in a rural town in 1995. But despite the lead detective’s diligence in following the clues step by step, the … Continue reading Only the River Flows (2023)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79169"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79289,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79169\/revisions\/79289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}