DIRECTOR Wei Shujun’s increasingly hallucinatory crime drama Only The River Flows has been puzzling audiences since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival 2023 – no one is completely sure what to make of its ending. 

What everyone has not quibbled over, however, is how surefooted Wei’s direction is. From the film’s opening sequence to its last, he reels the audience in with a steady unfolding of clues that keep running up against each other, until we can no longer tell who or what to believe in.

The story is set against a transitioning village in China in 1995, caught between the fading echoes of the Cultural Revolution and the impending wave of consumerism.