The Fatal Love
夺命杀机
China, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 83 mins.
Director: Yang Miao 杨苗.
Rating: 5/10.
Densely plotted mystery thriller is a watchable exercise in script virtuosity but little more.
STORY
Somewhere in China, the present day. A young man, Chen Hao (Shen Tai), wakes up in an underground room and can’t remember how he got there. A young woman, Jiang Yiyan (Jiang Song), is also there and has the same problem. After remembering she’s a surgeon, she finds a canister of ether that can cause temporary loss of memory. She deduces they’ve both been kidnapped and the room is an abandoned slaughterhouse. Chen Hao continues to have attacks of hysteria and injures his foot during a squabble with the cooler-headed Jiang Yiyan. After breaking through a wall, they end up inside a well-furnished shack in the middle of nowhere whose windows are all barred; they are observed by someone via CCTV. Chen Hao has another attack of hysteria, leading Jiang Yiyan to suspect he’s been fed an addictive drug over a long period. When he sees his own face on a magazine cover, he remembers he’s an actor. She then remembers she’d just discovered she was pregnant and had argued with a man – probably Chen Hao – who didn’t want the child; she has weals on her arms where she’d earlier tried to commit suicide. In the middle of all this, a mysterious woman, Wu Fei (Liu Dini), arrives at the shack. She has a gun and knows Jiang Yiyan, with whom she executed the kidnapping of Chen Hao to get a RMB5 million ransom from his wealthy middle-aged wife, Tang Jing (Feng Bo). (In a struggle, Chen Hao and Jiang Yiyan had fallen into the underground room and knocked over the canister of ether, temporarily losing their memory.) Wu Fei sends Jiang Yiyan off to make a telephone call and then reveals she’s the woman with whom Chen Hao had a fling during Christmas 2012. But that’s just the start of a complicated game of deception and double-dealing.
REVIEW
The twisty-turny plot is the thing in The Fatal Love 夺命杀机, a corkscrew mystery-thriller in the Mainland sub-genre where everyone tries to kill or double-cross everyone else, usually in a deserted location. The writer-director this time is Yang Miao 杨苗, 34, a Bejing Film Academy graduate who’s worked in TV drama, has directed several shorts but mainly works as a writer (most recently on The Big Shot “大”人物, 2019). Made some two years ago but only just released, Love is a watchable exercise in script virtuosity that just about goes the distance thanks to some charismatic performances, but at the end of the day is little more. Box office was microscopic.
During the first 10 minutes the audience is as much in the dark as the main characters, a young man and a young woman who wake up in an abandoned slaughterhouse with no memory of who they are or how they got there. The next 10 minutes see them breaking through into a room – actually a shack in the middle of nowhere – where they’re watched on CCTV by someone and realise they may have even been married. And then a sassy woman with a gun arrives. That’s when the story really begins, and the next, densely-plotted hour is taken up with Yang and his script associates moving the three characters around the chessboard as a fourth waits in the shadows to explain the grand scheme in a wordy finale.
The occasional burst of action is poorly staged, given the film’s highly schematic construction; it’s the dialogue that mostly motors things. Yang sometimes overdoes exchanges like “Who are you?” “Who do you think I am?” but the cast plays it straight and the widescreen photography by Chang Mang 昌茫, in both cramped interiors and wide-open spaces, is notable. Yang Mi 杨幂 lookalike Jiang Song 蒋松 is okay as the younger woman, with young Gu Tianle 古天乐 [Louis Koo] lookalike Shen Tai 沈泰 (from TVD) more wooden as the man; more charismatic playing comes from Liu Dini 刘迪妮 (also from TVD) as the sassy woman-in-charge and, especially, the classy Feng Bo 冯波 (so good in Invisible Killer 无形杀, 2009, Vegetate 我是植物人, 2010, and Fall of Ming 大明劫, 2013), the most experienced name in the cast, as the eminence grise.
The Chinese title means “Deadly Murder”. There is no English title on the film itself.
CREDITS
Presented by Shenzhen Top Vision Pictures (CN), Xi’an Shulin Film & TV Culture Communication (CN), Xi’an Dingfeng Taihe Film & TV Culture Communication (CN). Produced by Shenzhen Top Vision Pictures (CN), Xi’an Shulin Film & TV Culture Communication (CN), Xi’an Qujiang Meilin Film & TV Culture (CN), Xi’an Dingfeng Taihe Film & TV Culture Communication (CN).
Script: Yang Miao. Script planning: Chang Ben, Xiao Rui, Sha Feng, Gao Boyang. Photography: Chang Mang. Editing: Lu Lu, Lin Lin. Music: uncredited. Art direction: Xiong Xiong. Styling: Xie Tao. Sound: Shi Qian, Liu Cong, Kong Xiao. Action: uncredited. Executive direction: Zou Pengcheng.
Cast: Shen Tai (Chen Hao), Liu Dini (Wu Fei), Jiang Song (Jiang Yiyan), Feng Bo (Tang Jing), Liu Jingyi, Song Ge.
Release: China, 29 Jan 2019.