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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #31: Your Twisty Thriller Of 2009

I was planning to take this week off or the holidays, but during the festivities, I ended up watching what I think is the best thriller of 2009 (not that there were many good ones), so I decided to write about it before the year goes out.

Hollywood and movie audiences in general love twisty thrillers. People like to watch a story that's clever and that challenges them to feel more clever when they try to fathom the clues of the puzzle and how things are going to turn out. You could say the current era of the clever low- or medium-budget thriller began with Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS, which took the nonlinear route to revitalize the heist-gone-wrong thriller, using flashbacks to reveal parts of the story that you would normally have been shown in a linear story structure. Twisty plots are hard to pull off well, since there's always a risk of getting so contrived that the audience stops believing in what's happening, or becoming so obscure that the audience stops being able to follow the plot. To be able to pull one off is a mark of storytelling skill. If a neurological study is ever done, I'd love to read how twisty thrillers tickle the parts of the viewer's brain to invoke that kind of narrative pleasure and satisfaction. There's usually a new entry in the genre on average of every two years or three years, I don't know why there's usually such a gap and it's certainly not a conscious one on the part of the movie world. Maybe it does take that long to write and rewrite an twisty script that works properly. The most notable entries after RESERVOIR DOGS were Christopher McQuarrie and Bryan Singer's THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and the last truly notable American entry was Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's MEMENTO. Just about every aspiring screenwriter would kill to write a killer twisty thriller that could put them on the map. In the last few years, the truly satisfying and original twisty thriller seems to have come from Asia. There's the underrated Hammet-esque thriller about Chinese Triad enclaves in Tokyo, SLEEPLESS TOWN, one of the best gangster-detective thrillers of the genre, in my opinion. Alan Mak and Andrew Lau's INFERNAL AFFAIRS was so admired that it was remade into Scorsese's somewhat overripe THE DEPARTED.

The latest entry in the Clever Twisty Thriller is the Mainland Chinese spy thriller THE MESSAGE. It does what the Clever Twisty Thriller is supposed to do, which is to find a fresh way of telling what's usually regarded as a standard tale, by combining the Locked House Whodunnit with the World War II thriller, the spy drama and the state-approved patriotic drama. It also uses a corner of World War II that very few people know much about, the Chinese Resistance's fight against the Japanese and their puppet regime in China. A maverick Japanese Army officer sets out to catch the spy leaking intelligence from the government counter-insurgency unit in Nanking, since the Resistance is stepping up their assassination campaign against both Japanese officers and Chinese collaborators. He invites the suspected members of the senior staff to an "emergency meeting" at a country estate and keeps them there until he and his Chinese spycatcher can find out which of them is the mole. What follows is a twist on Agatha Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS where the officer and his lieutenant turn the screws on the suspects and eliminates them one by one, sometimes literally. The interrogations escalate from gentle questioning to outright torture, and the paranoid staff start to turn on each other while the spy stays hidden. There are some neat reversals on the whodunnit genre: the maverick detective and his assistant are representatives of Japanese brutality and meglomania, and the hidden spy is the real hero. The story could have been told from the spy's point of view, but it chooses to tell an ensemble piece instead, so that you're kept guessing who the spy is as accusations and recriminations mount, and you only see the spy's handiwork at dodging the officer's latest ploys to rattle them all. It's only at the end that the revelations and twists come thick and fast, and the structure of the story opens up to reveal what was inside the traps that sprang into place without our knowing. It's all earned and planned, and you get the satisfaction of a tale well-told.

The look and feel of the movie recalls Hitchcock and noir. The country house is reminiscent of SPELLBOUND, but the story is very much its own animal. The script is adapted from a bestselling novel by Mai Jin, who's pretty much China's le Carré. With a background in the propaganda unit of the Chinese Army, and access to the reports and procedures used by the Chinese Resistance in the War, Mai Jin peppered the story with the many tricks both the Japanese and the Chinese Resistance used, the codes, the cryptography, the leaking of false intelligence as traps, and the pressures of deep cover. It's interesting to consider THE MESSAGE alongside recent Hollywood WWII dramas. VALKYRIE is a straightforward suspense drama of the type you used to see a lot in the Sixties and Seventies. Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is an alternate world fantasia that quotes the genre extensively. Where INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS had the feel of a post-modernist put-on even as it holds its Jewish revenge fantasy wish-fulfillment at a jokey arm's length, there's no sense of ironic detachment in THE MESSAGE at all. . It has an air of authenticity that many comics and Hollywood movies don't achieve, and the closest you get in comics is Garth Ennis' earnest WWII comics. THE MESSAGE stands alone: it's written by someone who talked the talk, and made by people who knew it.

I watched a Hong Kong Region 3 DVD of THE MESSAGE that I bought from my local Chinatown shop. There are no plans for a US release that I know of. The DVD can be easily found in Chinatown video shops and online shops like Yes Asia.

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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