Black Coal, Thin Ice

The conventions of the Hollywood film noir – the hard-boiled investigator working a puzzling case, the femme fatale with a secret, the trail of clues – have been transplanted to the gritty industrial north of China in Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice. The winner of the Golden Bear and best actor awards at the Berlin Film Festival has Liao Fan as Zhang Zili, a recently divorced police officer, who is working to discover why severed body parts are turning up in coal plants around the province in 1999. The case takes Zhang through an urban winter landscape of icy roads and tunnels, an outdoor skating rink, a gambling club and repeated visits to a laundry, where he finds himself attracted to an enigmatic suspect. It is a world of casual violence, compromise, betrayal and cruelty, with humans only as valuable as the coal dumped onto conveyor belts. While the plot has a certain baffling quality and the script could have been tightened, Diao has created an atmospheric thriller with a spectacular finale.