Endless Loop
黑暗迷宫
China, 2017, colour, 2.35:1, 97 mins.
Director: Wen He 温河.
Rating: 7/10.
Despite a crazy premise, this inventive psycho-horror maintains mystery and suspense till the end.
STORY
Jintaishan, Northern China, 26 Sep 2016. To avoid a traffic jam on the mountain highway, bus driver Qian (Du Yiheng) recommends taking a detour through a disused tunnel on their way to Longxiang. The six passengers are insurance salesman Ma Wen (Luan Yuanhui), who tells a gruesome yarn about a serial killer in the area; slutty Tang Xinyu (Yu Weiwei); shy teenager Xiaoxi (Qi Lanyin) and her equally shy elder brother Zhouzhou (Lu Zhuo); heavily pregnant Wu Yu (Cheng Shuang); and tunnel engineer Han Shen (Chen Zhen). On the way, they pick up a suspicious looking man, Chen Jia (Nie Yuan). After 20 minutes of driving, however, the tunnel still shows no signs of coming to an end, and when the bus turns round it’s the same story. Han Shen and Chen Jia try walking back to the entrance, unspooling some knitting wool being used by Wu Yu; when that runs out, he finds some fishing line on the road, which he attaches to the wool. The tunnel fills with mist, and as Han Shen and Chen Jia walk on they find themselves back where they started. At the end of the fishing line is a severed finger. Han Shen says the tunnel can’t be an endless loop as it’s perfectly straight. When he and others go off to re-check the walls, the women fall asleep in the bus and wake to find it covered with dust and their pooled food supplies gone bad. They are also hungry again. It is as if time in the tunnel is accelerating. A map that suddenly appears in the bus shows the tunnel is not especially long and runs north-south, whereas Han Shen’s compass shows it runs east-west. The tunnel lighting suddenly goes out and Han Shen disappears; while searching for him, the group discovers a hidden door in the wall that leads to a room in which there are severed hands in bottles and construction plans that show six parallel tunnels were built. A wall calendar is stuck at 15 Jul 1996. A hidden passage leads to one of the other tunnels, inside which is the group’s bus, fresh food supplies – and a gun. Driven by hunger, the members of the group start to fight among themselves.
REVIEW
The directing debut of scriptwriter Wen He 温河, Endless Loop 黑暗迷宫 is proof that censorship guidelines can often prove a spur to creativity. Bouncing off the Mainland requirement that paranormal films must have a rational explanation, the movie starts as a fantastic horror – bus passengers trapped in a tunnel that seems to have no exit, with a serial killer maybe on the loose – but then veers off in a completely different direction when most Mainland psycho-horrors are getting ready to wheel in a psychologist to explain everything. It’s a more elaborate riff – backed this time by the giant Bona Group – on ideas that Wen was exploring in ghost movie Nowhere to Run 封门诡影 (2015), on which he was lead writer and a creative producer 监制. Like the earlier film, Loop took a while to reach Mainland screens following an overseas premiere in summer 2017 but ranks as one of the more inventive in its genre and marks Wen as a name to watch. Alas, local audiences were unimpressed, shelling out a mere RMB4 million, way below the tally for Nowhere (RMB26 million).
Things start like a bog-standard Mainland horror, with a shock intro leading to the main story of a small bus taking a short cut through a disused tunnel in the mountains. The passengers are a generic cross-section: a mouthy insurance salesman in glasses, a trashy siren in a slit skirt, two shy teenagers, a pregnant single mother and – yes! – a tunnel engineer whose expertise comes in useful. En route, the driver also lets on a suspicious-looking man with a knife. When the bus finds it can’t exit the tunnel, it’s then that the script starts shaking up things, initially with a seemingly insoluble paradox: the tunnel seems to be an endless loop, but that is impossible as it’s completely straight. And why does time seem to be accelerating within it?
It’s only at this point, almost 20 minutes in, that the film’s main title appears – as if signalling the real development of the plot. Ma and co-writer Shi Xintao 史新韬 literally take a left turn to expand the action beyond the tunnel, taking the story into more and more surreal and bloody territory until, at the hour mark, and with most of the cast seemingly out of the picture, the script abruptly reinvents itself. But as in Nowhere, what seems like a rote explanation of the unexplainable develops its own momentum.
The visual style – more and more elaborate to this point – also changes, mixing the everyday with stage-like, abstract sets (the latter idea also visible in Nowhere). It’s all highly outrageous but highly watchable, partly because the mystery and suspense are still maintained when most Mainland horrors have run out of ideas. At the 80-minute mark Loop is still coming up with WTF moments.
Performances are all fine without any dominating as a star presence. TV actor Nie Yuan 聂远, 40, who was impressive as the new secret police chief in Brotherhood of Blades 绣春刀 (2014) and was solid as the lead in crime drama The Blizzard 道高一丈 (2018), slowly builds from the initially mysterious passenger into a more central figure, while character actor Luan Yuanhui 栾元晖, also 40, has the showier role of the annoying insurance salesman. Model-actress Yu Weiwei 余薇薇, 30, adds spice as the slutty passenger and Ge Tian 葛天 (the possessed reporter in Nowhere) some class as a trapped female victim.
On the technical side, art direction by Lu Wei 鲁伟 (rom-coms Mr Pride and Miss Prejudice 傲娇与偏见, 2016, and 21 Karat 21克拉, 2018; crime comedy Really? 我说的都是真的！, 2018) and Yang Ning 杨宁 stands out for its imagination. Editing by Fang Yuan 方远 (A Fool 一个勺子, 2014) is succinct. The Chinese title literally means “Dark Labyrinth”.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Bona Film Culture Communication (CN), Beijing Size Pictures (CN), Beijing Huawei Pictures (CN), Beijing Struggle Film (CN).
Script: Wen He, Shi Xintao. Script planning: Chen Ya’er. Photography: Cheng Tianxiao, Xu Junhao. Editing: Fang Yuan. Music editing: Liao Heru. Art direction: Lu Wei, Yang Ning. Styling: Wu Renna. Sound: Yang Guang, Duan Haiying, Liu Tao. Action: Wang Shuanbao. Visual effects: Chi Yun, Han Xinyuan, Chen Xiaolei (Blue Castle). Executive direction: Cheng Tianxiao.
Cast: Nie Yuan (Chen Jia), Ge Tian (Zhao Xin), Du Yiheng (Qian, driver), Chu Junchen (Zhang Zhou), Luan Yuanhui (Ma Wen), Yu Weiwei (Tang Xinyu), Lu Zhuo (Zhouzhou), Cheng Shuang (Wu Yu), Chen Zhen (Han Shen), Qi Lanyin (Xiaoxi), Guo Jianuo (Zhao, police officer), Chang Cheng (Li, clinic manager), Jiang Dai (police officer), Huo Shaoyi (Taotao), Chen Shuai (young Zhang Zhou), Liu Yilin (lorry driver).
Premiere: World Science Fiction Convention, Helsinki, 12 Aug 2017.
Release: China, 31 Oct 2018.