Critics reviews

[Suzhou River's] complexity is far more than a display of the director’s virtuosity... [It] warns viewers to watch the film strategically, not to take it at face value, to be wary of what they’re seeing even as his enticing tale draws them in... By turning hypotheticals into certitudes and myths into realities, is provoking viewers to bypass the positive news that is the stuff of official media and the positive images of life that underpin personal optimism.

Suzhou River is mercurial and dazzling; it intermittently shifts perspectives and brings memories to its surface in past-tense narration, enmeshing present and past, truth and fiction.

An overpowering mood of longing and regret and passion, like Fallen Angels mixed with Vertigo — but at the same time, Suzhou River is so distanced by the narrative game-playing that extracting anything more meaningful becomes impossible.

The power of this filmmaking makes us engrossed in this love story such that we forget it is a tale being told to us, just as we forget that the whole thing is a film we are watching.

The style of the film is closer to the Danish Dogme school than classical Chinese neo-realism. Director Lou Ye uses a handheld camera, Shanghai night life locations and a frenzied zoom lens with the enthusiasm of an adventurous student.

Suzhou River has more atmosphere than it does coherence; it’s a series of floating tricks and gambits in search of a resolution. Even so, Ye’s Vertigo fever is contagious.

The dreamlike quality of this swooningly romantic story is enhanced by the hand-held camerawork... Lou Ye's film doesn't have the power of Hitchcock's masterwork, [Vertigo,] nor does it manage to gain depth by association, but it's a charming, elegiac film in search of a popular audience.

[A] beautifully acted and masterfully controlled picture... [Suzhou River] is freighted with mystery, melancholy and eroticism in equal measure - and it's a fantastic advertisement for buffalo-grass vodka.

[Lou Ye] has originality and ability in equal measure, and he balances his film between lengthy tracking shots of the river - to create dream-like imagery - and hand held camera work to stress the busy streets of Shanghai and the daily life of the courier... [He] has created a polished tale of mystery and imagination, leaving it to himself to supply the mystery, and us the imagination.

With clever visual and narrative legerdemain, Mr. Lou folds two stories together... ''Suzhou River'' offers impeccable attitude and captivating atmosphere, but little emotional or intellectual impact.

As our identification comes to rest with the camera, Lou exposes the ways that the technology of memory displaces human remembering, making every girl in the film the girl we would follow to the ends of the earth.

[Suzhou River] at first seems like a Wong Kar-wai remake of Vertigo, but in fact it’s something much stranger, drawing on not only Hitchcock and Chungking Express but also Hollywood noir and Hans Christian Andersen to create something relatively fresh from the confluence—a postmodern fairy tale about romantic obsession. This is well worth checking out