NYAFF REVIEW: Teenager tries to understand the murderous world in ‘What’s in the Darkness’
What’s in the Darkness, which recently played the New York Asian Film Festival, follows a teenage girl trying to grasp the many changes that are occurring in her life. For starters, her local community has been stricken with a serial-killer case that keeps everyone searching for the person who could commit such grisly crimes. She’s also struggling at home with her parents, who slap her, yell at her and make life mostly abominable. Finally, she’s trying to figure out life at school, life with friends, life with a first boyfriend and life away from the dread.
The debut feature from Wang Yichun is powerful and perplexing. What’s in the Darkness doesn’t fit into any easy mold. It’s part whodunit, but the outcome of the murder case doesn’t factor much into the narrative. It’s part coming-of-age story, but she takes a much broader view of this community in the early 1990s. The difficult-to-classify nature of the drama is what makes the story realistic, effective and frustratingly anti-climatic.
Su Xiaotong plays Jing, the main character. She’s a nice girl who goes about life as a watcher, someone who absorbs the many stories and characters around her. Xiaotong doesn’t say much throughout the 98-minute feature, but that’s because she’s learning how to deal with everything and everyone for the first time. Plus, her parents are fairly atrocious and speak for her often. Her mother is constantly slapping Jing upside her head, scolding her for not understanding some concept and deriding her for existing in the first place. The problem, of course, is that Jing has many questions about adulthood and the evil around the community, but her mother refuses to turn any encounter into a teachable moment.
Jing’s father, played effectively by Guo Xiao, is a local police officer who gives more time to Jing, but he’s also prone to outbursts that turn cruel and destructive. At one point, he tells Jing he wished they had a boy rather than a girl. As a law-enforcement official, he seems fairly hopeless in catching the culprit, which is a metaphor for this community’s inability to stop this lurking evil from overtaking people’s lives.
When Jing walks around town, any man over the age of 30 looks creepy and evil. This is an intentional choice by writer-director Yichun. She’s portraying the narrative through the eyes of this teenager. The rural village of Hebei Province, where What’s in the Darkness is set, comes off as a community in transition, a place not fit for younger people who have so many questions about life, although it’s hard to imagine too many places in the world that are geared toward younger folks.
At school, Jing must deal with boys, including one played by Deng Gang, and an older, more confident schoolgirl played by Lu Qiwei. These characters help fill in the blanks for Jing because her parents prove to be ineffective as teachers.
There are several sweet moments in the narrative. The audience sees Jing practicing a singing-and-dance routine atop a broken-down metal container, and one hopes she breaks out of this cycle and realizes her dreams. When her father brings her to the local park to learn how to ride a two-wheel bicycle, there’s a nice parent-child moment.
However, always lurking, always in the shadows, is news of the heinous crime and the questions of youth. Yichun films several of the scenes from unique perspectives. At one point, Jing and her friends are heading along a trail, and the camera takes the point of view of someone hiding behind the leaves of a tree, just watching and waiting. It’s a disorienting perspective but one that shows the challenges that Jing and others are facing in this Chinese province.
What’s in the Darkness, which surely serves a metaphor for China’s great changes in the 1990s, is an intimate, often powerful tale about the clashing of societal trends. Everyone in this village is on a different wavelength, and that makes it a scary and confusing place to grow up.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
- What’s in the Darkness
- In Mandarin with English subtitles
- 2015
- Written and directed by Wang Yichun
- Starring Su Xiaotong, Guo Xiao, Lu Qiwei and Deng Gang
- Running time: 98 minutes
- Rating:
