REVIEW: ‘The Wild Goose Lake’
Photo: The Wild Goose Lake stars, from left, Regina Wan and Lun-Mei Kwei. Photo courtesy of Film Movement / Provided by press page with permission.
The Wild Goose Lake, the new film from writer-director Yi’nan Diao, follows a gangster in China — Wuhan, to be exact — as he plays an intricate cat-and-mouse game with the local police. The arthouse picture, which is available to stream online given that movie theaters are largely shuttered across North America, is a bruising, brutal tale filled with violence, double-crosses and some martial arts.
The movie opens with a meeting of criminals in a hotel conference room (apparently that’s a thing), where an inevitable fight breaks out, and enemies find themselves at one another’s throats. Eventually Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), a respected leader amongst crime bosses, finds himself caught up in the disarray and ends up accidentally shooting a police officer. For this sin, he needs to run and hide out in the alleyways and hideaways of the city, attempting to stay one foot ahead of the many people who want his blood.
Zhou realizes the only way he is going to survive is if he can get a message through to his wife, played by Regina Wan, although she is being surveilled. To aid him in this endeavor, he employs the help of an intermediary: Aiai Liu (Lun-Mei Kwei), a young woman who tries to simultaneously stay connected to the sordid affair and yet keep one step out of the spotlight. She largely succeeds, but when Zhou needs increasingly more help, she is sucked in as an accomplice.
The community of criminals, including corrupt police officers, who circulate around this central triumvirate can be nasty and frighteningly violent. There are many scenes of fighting and abuse, and this makes Zhou and Aiai’s joint quest that much more imperative. They are truly staying one step in front of the monsters.
The movie is not perfect, for a number of reasons. The overall narrative is not terribly interesting, and the exposition that gets Zhou running in the first place seems both coincidental and unbelievable.
Although Ge is solid as the lead, the real breakout star is Kwei, who is mysterious, seductive, strong and curious. She is a committed insider and outsider, which gives her the upper-hand in many cases, but she also faces brutality and menace.
Diao, whose other movies include Black Coal, Thin Ice and Night Train, knows how to expertly stage the story, keeping the narrative moving along at a fast clip and with few interruptions. His filming of the fight choreography is a highlight, with many fists and legs flying like bombastic ballet movements.
The Wild Goose Lake, perhaps a reference to a “wild goose chase,” doesn’t add too much to the thriller sub-genre of cat-and-mouse chase films, but within the confines of these two hours, the director and actors are able to sell an engaging and nail-biting journey. In fact, the acting is so good, and the characterizations so rich in detail, that one invests in the movie’s outcome, hoping those who deserve a happy ending receive it and those who deserve to be jailed ultimately face justice. That said, justice is hard to come by in such a bleak view of the world.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Wild Goose Lake (2019). Written and directed by Yi’nan Diao. Starring Ge Hu, Lun-Mei Kwei, Fan Liao and Regina Wan. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Running time: 110 minutes. Rating: 
