Bloody Daisy [追凶十九年]

Released: 2019  Viewed February 2020

The film [Nineteen Years of Pursuit in Chinese] opens in dramatic fashion with one character crashing out a window to his death. It then flashes back to 1999 to a small city in northern China where Liu Yibo [Wang Longzheng] is a detective assigned to investigate a brutal murder. A woman had her throat cut and a daisy incised into her skin.

Three years later, the victim’s brother, He Chen [Song Ningfeng], has become a policeman and is transferred to the area. He is just in time to investigate a further similar murder.

The two cops follow up a series of red herrings without much obvious system or progress. Meanwhile the murder count slowly rises.

At the same time, Liu and his wife, Guo Jing [Huang Lu, from Blood 13], attempt to deal (equally unsuccessfully) with his erectile dysfunctions issues.

Eventually, however, his wife becomes pregnant and Liu gives up the murder investigation to return to more regular police work, such as raiding brothels. But he is unable to resist the desire to solve the murders and he goes back to the case. This contributes to a further tragedy.

The film is commendably low-key and avoids the normal dramatic twist and turns of such a movie. But it is perhaps too low-key for its own good and not clear enough about what it is trying to do.

It’s not a classic murder mystery as, in the end, it does not much matter who the murderer is. Nor is it a detective movie as the cops are simply shown to wander about aimlessly trying to solve the crime. The real focus of the film is on Liu Yibo’s rather unsuccessful attempts to live his life and his relationships with fellow cop He and with his wife.

Unfortunately however, Liu is too much of a stock character to retain our interest for the duration of the film. ‘Maverick cop with relationship issues who is over-committed to his work’ has been done before.

First-time Director Xu Xiangyun does show promise. The camerawork is excellent and the film quietly shows the dramatic changes taking place in the background as, for example, one of the murder sites becomes a massive mall. It certainly warrants better than the 5.6 on Douban or the 4.3 on IMDB.

The film ends with a lengthy dedication to the police force, presumably to balance the fact that the police are portrayed as not very competent human beings in this movie.