Recencies van critici

Like a more showily virtuosic version of his countryman Jia Zhangke (who worked with Liao in his own recent gangster thriller “Ash Is Purest White”), Diao uses the conventions of genre to illuminate a world where crime, corruption, rapid social flux and soul-crushing inequality are inextricably intertwined.

Where the study discovered hysteria among chickens, sterility among rabbits, and cannibalism among pigs, The Wild Goose Lake offers its own insanities of mass incarceration. Going beyond the black and white nihilism of old school noir, Diao’s world is portrayed as entirely absurd, often resembling the overpopulated, labyrinthine landscapes of Orson Welles’s The Trial—only more lurid and spectacular.

Moody and muscular, The Wild Goose Lake posits connection only in its characters’ shades of fatalistic desperation.

More even then on its strengths as an expertly directed piece of entertainment, Diao’s latest impresses for its scathing, and unexpected, indictment of societal ills—for how the filmmaker recognizes the extent to which the contours of a sordid genre film appropriately express realities of Chinese life.

Despite of all its cruelty, the last scene can be read as a sign of hope, as two women peacefully walk together as if protesting against the ruthless patriarchy of their homeland—it’s a final glimmer of light in an otherwise unrelentingly dark vision.

While Chinese director Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake hardly reconfigures the crime thriller afresh, it does pare it down to the essentials to exhilarating effect, progressively jettisoning the whys and wherefores of plot to focus on little more than two bodies moving through any number of ravishing, noirish spaces.

The film is visually dazzling, even if its storytelling is sprawling at times and its social commentary forced.

“The Wild Goose Lake” may just end up being the last word in Chinese crime noir, because it does not want (or need) to be anything else.

This hyper-stylish manhunt drama laces slow-burn atmospherics with abrupt outbursts of staccato action, and boils down characterisation to the leanest of bare bones, making for minimalist existentialism in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville.

Like the waters lapping up against the shores of its murky titular setting, Diao Yinan’s fugitive thriller The Wild Goose Lake (Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui) is a film that doesn’t hit you like a tidal wave as much as it gradually washes over you, leaving in its wake a series of memorable set-pieces and a dense, dark web of violence and fatality.