An insomniac detective with an ice maiden wife falls for a woman who can offer him all the warmth, understanding and touchingly human imperfection missing from his marriage. Unfortunately, she's also a murderer.
It's a pretty good metaphor for anxiety about opening up to feeling, but maybe not all that new: very similar vacillation between attraction and suspicion occurs constantly in Hitchcock, a clear model for this, and compared to every crisply executed instance in the master's work, this gets into awful, convoluted and tedious plot tangles. The central relationship here - a perfectionist cop who prides himself on never fluffing a case vs a repeat offending killer who always ends up having strong justification and a hard luck story to win you over - does offer some interesting new angles on the trope, but the endless business of her complicatedly explaining away her apparent guilt becomes absurd and is, anyway, much hampered by a lack of storytelling economy.
There's also a ton of tricksy jumping around in space and occasionally time, which is jarring and confusing and doesn't seem to me to mean much.
Tang Wei as the sympathetically homicidal female lead is pretty great, though.
It's a pretty good metaphor for anxiety about opening up to feeling, but maybe not all that new: very similar vacillation between attraction and suspicion occurs constantly in Hitchcock, a clear model for this, and compared to every crisply executed instance in the master's work, this gets into awful, convoluted and tedious plot tangles. The central relationship here - a perfectionist cop who prides himself on never fluffing a case vs a repeat offending killer who always ends up having strong justification and a hard luck story to win you over - does offer some interesting new angles on the trope, but the endless business of her complicatedly explaining away her apparent guilt becomes absurd and is, anyway, much hampered by a lack of storytelling economy.
There's also a ton of tricksy jumping around in space and occasionally time, which is jarring and confusing and doesn't seem to me to mean much.
Tang Wei as the sympathetically homicidal female lead is pretty great, though.