Recensioni de* critic*

The film is a brilliant instance of genre being deployed as a code that can transcend time and space: by referencing the recognizable features of classical film noir, the movie links two contexts that seem at first to be irreconcilable, making legible the wide, homogenizing reach of capitalism across epochs and cultural borders.

Diao paints light on the dirty snow and frosted glass, the result at times strikingly, starkly beautiful: the sick greenish-yellow of the lights at a nighttime ice rink, the reds and purples of neon signage. Noir was never supposed to be a big-budget genre; it works with what it can get. In snow-coated apartment blocks and industrial landscapes, Black Coal, Thin Ice finds a deep, deadly chill.

Black Coal, Thin Ice is noir stripped so bare that its stark procedural lapses into the abstract, where bleached daytime shots create a purgatory that lapses into the hell of the night, where monochrome contrasts of black skies and icy streets are given a sinister gloss by neon green and fuchsia.

Tracing a former detective's complicated quest to solve a very cold case indeed, its narrative eventually freezes into impenetrability, but it's an alluring void.

A seemingly familiar tale of emotional and sexual dependency, Diao's third feature is rendered strange and intoxicating by the director's methodical pacing and duplex narrative structure, proceeding from passages of macabre violence to sequences of surreal imagery and tense encounters pregnant with parallel meaning and suppressed passions.

Puzzling out the whos, the whys and the WTFs of this marvellously oddball case takes a back seat to drinking in the film's dark, shining evocation of night and the city. The staging is like Tarantino in a brooding funk: take the beauty parlour face-off, a flurry of crazed action against a chequered floor bathed in pink light. There are hints of Vertigo in the central relationship. But if Diao's intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

In the context of the immediate competition, Black Coal, Thin Ice was one of some half-dozen works best described as crime films for people who hate crime films—mid-level art-house fare that tries to look different by toying with genre elements while taking care to avoid being mistaken for an outright thriller or a policier.

My friend Mike Walsh of Australia pointed out that the mainland [Chinese] cinema's bleak realism seems to be starting to blend with traditional genre material... Diao's film reminds us that you can create a neo-noir in two ways: By taking a mystery and dirtying it up, or taking concrete reality and probing the mysteries lurking in it.

It wouldn't be surprising if Black Coal, Thin Ice were to give the [Chinese] authorities a headache: it's the darkest shade of noir, replete with dismemberment and sexual violence, though Diao juices it up with a subtly insinuating neon glow, a remarkably daring sense of absurdist humour, and some very witty and stylish flourishes.

The sheer diversity of visual vocabulary here is stunning, and Diao is able to command the images of every scene to conjure an odd feeling that is hard to place and articulate. How rare to encounter a film with motivations that can't be detected, that can hardly be caught up to. One senses the director approaching each scene with the thought "how do I make this as unlike anything we've seen," even if the resulting choices are subtle and discreet.

In its first half, the film is excellent. The unkempt, unorthodox detective, the sudden bursts of violence and acrobatic action, and the dark, incongruous humor, all of which are strongly reminiscent of Bong Joon-ho's work, move the story along at a brisk, captivating pace. As Zhang sleuths his way to the truth, however, this momentum disappears. The primary reason for this is sloppy storytelling, which makes the increasingly complex chain of events confusing instead of intriguing.

the film is flawed by the odd clumsy, perhaps unintentionally funny moment and by a narrative that occasionally rambles a little; but it deploys its staple elements – divorced detective who drinks too much, femme fatale, mysterious prime suspect – with genuine affection, so that one forgives and is carried along by any familiar tropes. It's also good to see a film which is pleasingly discreet in evoking rather than explicitly depicting horrendous violence.