What’s in the Darkness
New York Asian Film Festival 2016
June 22 - July 9, 2016
A young girl in a rural Chinese village becomes perversely fascinated with a series of unsolved murders, as her cop father tries to solve the case despite his colleagues’ incompetence. Debut director Wang Yichun invokes the perils of repressed desire while equating China’s transition to capitalism with the prurient confusion of puberty.
A coming-of-age fable mapped onto an unsolved crime story, at once dream-hazed and sharp-edged with suspense, Variety called writer/director Wang Yichun’s outstanding debut “the most acute and uncompromisingly grim murder mystery to come out of China in years,” but the film owes as much to The Diary of a Teenage Girl as it does to Diary of a Serial Killer. What’s in the Darkness brilliantly evokes the perils of repressed desire, while equating China’s transition to capitalism with the prurient confusion of puberty. In a semi-rural village of Hebei Province in the early 1990s, someone is raping and killing young women, and carving a cross into their flesh. Following the case with perverse fascination, Jing (Su Xiaotong) struggles to harness her emerging sexuality while her father (Guo Xiao), a low-level cop, futilely tries to convince his incompetent colleagues of the merits of forensic investigation. Presented with the support of China Institute.
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