Back in the 1980s and 90s, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) was acclaimed as one of the most talented directors to emerge from China’s “fifth generation”, film-makers whose work broke with the socialist realist style of their predecessors. While still working within the establishment industry, the fifth generation – including Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang – were considered to varying degrees if not quite dissident, at least somewhat heterodox and anti-authoritarian. Either way, having started out as a cinematographer, Zhang quickly became an arthouse darling abroad, feted for his lush visual style, his command of highly kinetic action sequences (as seen in wuxia extravaganzas like Hero and House of Flying Daggers) and eye for spotting and showcasing great female actors, such as Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi.
Today, in a very different political and national landscape, Zhang doesn’t have the same heroic, darling-of-the-west aura anymore. He’s become an establishment figure and chief engineer of state-sponsored spectacles like the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics and Winter Olympics. If, unlike Wim Wenders, you can’t entirely separate politics from art, then Zhang’s latest, Scare Out, looks like pro-state propaganda, given it is about spies trying to flush out a mole among their ranks who is smuggling super-secret tech to nefarious western rivals.
Mind you, the screenplay credited to Chen Liang, has little to say about ideology or technology, except in so far as they help serve up all the bangs and whizzes the film wants to deliver. Ideology gets transmuted here into issues around personal loyalty to friends, spouses and co-workers. Meanwhile, the super-secret military tech that is the film’s MacGuffin is much less the point than all the drones and AI-powered kit the spies use to track their foes across the futuristic metropolis of contemporary Shenzhen, where the film is set.
From the off, Scare Out offers a constant flurry of aerial footage, snappy edits and jump cuts back and forth between the black-clad spies, at first under command of Huang Kai (Zhu Yilong) working out of a room full of flickering monitors watched by monotone underlinings. Another set of spies, like Huang’s bestie Yan Di (Jackson Yee), are on the streets, stalking westerners in sportswear through the immaculately clean city centre. The film’s pre-publicity hype is upping parallels with John Le Carré; presumably because of the double agent stuff, but cinematically this is more like a cross between Mission: Impossible and the Hong Kong-set Infernal Affairs franchise, the latter remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed.
Scare Out doesn’t have the psychological depth of the first, immaculate Infernal Affairs film, but Zhu is tremendously watchable as a spymaster with secrets of his own who has been having an affair with sultry siren Bai Fan (Yang Mi). The last 15 minutes performs an acrobatic display of twists, not unlike Olympic ice-skating displays. Still, Zhang’s incredible command of the craft is fully on display, the cinematic equivalent of quadruple axles, salchows and super-fast spins with one leg held behind the head.
Scare Out is in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 February, and in Australian cinemas now.