Only The River Flows review – a Chinese crime thriller awash with mystery 

The omnipresence of the police procedural in western novels, TV and film has turned the genre into comfort food. That can seem strange if you pause to consider how many of these stories take bloody murder as their starting point. But perhaps they are soothing because our protagonists tend to power hose away all the moral murk surrounding a crime and ultimately set the world back on its axis. Thank you for your service, Death in Paradise.

Seeking out cop stories set beyond the US and UK feels like a simple way to expand your palette with some new flavours. (Most commonly: what brand of cigarettes is everyone going to smoke in this one?) Give me a textured 1980s film like Gorky Park, with William Hurt’s stiffly noble Moscow cop Renko trying to solve a gruesome triple murder while KGB agents loom all around. Or the more recent The Roundup movie series, a Korean cop franchise starring Don Lee – the burly sweetheart from Train to Busan and The Eternals – as a single-minded detective throwing rousing haymakers in search of justice. 

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There is not much cosy crime to be found in Only the River Flows, a murder mystery that unfolds in southern China, but it is a very beguiling experience. It is the year 1995 in an overcast rural town where the next downpour is never that far away. Captain Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) is a plainclothes detective with a pregnant wife and a melancholy air. At work, he favours a very Clarkson-esque black leather jacket and a near-continuous chain of cigs. 

When an elderly widow is found murdered by the river, it is Ma’s young team who must investigate, donning fishing waders in search of evidence and taking swings at pig carcasses to try and identify the type of knife used. According to local gossip, the victim had periodically taken in an unpredictable, unhoused loner, whom everyone simply refers to as “the madman”.

To Ma’s commanding officer – a pompous ping-pong fiend – this signals an open-and-shut case that should be slammed shut pronto. “Our superiors are watching,” he tells Ma, meaningfully. 

For his part, Ma doggedly follows the evidence trail even after calmly apprehending the prime suspect. A handbag found by the body sends him off on another tangent. But potential suspects keep coming forward voluntarily, keen to present their point of view before they are found and fed into the procedural grinder. They all acknowledge that to become a person of interest in such a case means they will simply be steamrollered by the state. 

The empathetic Ma seems to be genuinely looking for the truth rather than a scapegoat. But the body count inexorably starts to rise. Instead of bringing order to the world, he seems to somehow be instigating more chaos. It is not just the investigation that begins to feel wobbly. Ma and his wife receive some upsetting news. Dream sequences intrude. Reality itself seems to be sliding away. Meanwhile, the rain continues to hammer down. 

If untangling the case looks to be just out of reach for Ma, it is tricky for the audience too. But Only the River Flows is big on vibes. Mostly shot on 16mm, it looks richly cinematic with lustrous shadows and authentic-looking scratches on occasional frames. When we first meet them, Ma’s team are relocating their unit to a disused cinema, blowing dust off hulking old film projectors and finding discarded reels of martial arts movies in odd corners.  

Is this eccentric base of operations meant to suggest their work is merely performative? It certainly got the back of my mind thinking about movies. The constant rain and nagging sense of being one step behind the truth chimes with Seven, a film from actual 1995 that, theoretically, could be playing in a US cinema on the other side of the world while Ma is huddled in his office (a repurposed projectionist booth). 

With its backwater setting and lack of cultural signifiers familiar to western viewers, Only the River Flows could be taking place in the 1970s as much as the 1990s. The sporadic use of Beethoven’s mournful Moonlight Sonata on the soundtrack only adds to the sense of timelessness. But it might be helpful to think of it less as a Chinese puzzle box to be definitively solved and more of an enigmatic mystery in which to immerse yourself. Take a deep breath first. 

Only the River Flows is in cinemas from 16 August. 

Preview: EIFF 2024

The Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is still findings its feet after a financial implosion in late 2022. But this year’s 77th instalment certainly starts strong with UK premieres of addiction drama The Outrun starring Saoirse Ronan (above) and sci-fi slasher Alien: Romulus. Veteran movie provocateur Gaspar Noé is also in town for a career-spanning chat.

The EIFF runs from 15-21 August. Graeme Virtue is a film and TV critic.

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