The Long Night [沉默的真相] (2020)

Another in the iQiYi Light On series of crime TV dramas. This series (The Silent Truth in Chinese) is also based on a book by Zi Jinchen (aka Xu Chen) and features moody detective Yan Liang (also seen in Burning Ice) though now played by Liao Fan.

The series is set in the (fictional) central Jiangtan city and is apparently (and probably very loosely) based on real events concerning the sexual abuse of underage girls.

The series opens as lawyer Zhang Chao (Burning Ice’s Ning Li) is found in a subway station with a dead body in a large suitcase. Zhang confesses to having killed the man, his former student and ex-prosecutor Jiang Yang [Bai Lu]. But when his trial starts, it emerges that he has a solid alibi and was 1,000 km away in Beijing at the time.

This all acts as the opening for a complex plot involving the ‘current day’ investigation (it’s set in 2010 for no obvious reason other than the usual ‘all in the past’ excuse) into the murder of Jiang Yang conducted by the police led by Captain Ren [Lu Xiaolin] with the assistance of maverick Yan Liang [Liao]; Jiang Yang’s 2003 investigation into the death of his classmate Hou Guiping [Lu Siyu); and Hou’s 2000 investigation into the death of a young woman in a rural village. Thus we have three plots in different times and all of these are connected in some way.

As the story develops we begin to understand that it involves some very illegal activities by a corporation (involving bribery of local government officials and prostitution/rape of schoolgirls) which have been covered up by local police and prosecutors. The plot does hang together better than some in the Light On series though it is still excessively complicated (especially the contrived death of Jiang Yang which leads to a tedious expository final episode).

The series is unusually open about police and local government corruption and, perhaps even more insidious, official reluctance to rock the boat which leads to cover ups as shown here. The series was very popular, scoring a phenomenal 9.2 on Douban. The uncovering of the ‘silent truth’ seems to have resonated with the audience with many commentators on Douban recounting stories of similar local heroes.

However, the characterisation is very variable. The 2000 events, perhaps due to (self) censorship given the topic, don’t get much airtime and the most character-focused sections concern Jiang Yang’s investigation. We get several meals (aka drinking sessions) with Jiang and his colleagues Zhu Wei [Zhao Yang] and Chen Mingzhang [Tian Xiaojie] as they try to discover proof of what happened in 2000.

The most recent section is the thinnest. Liao Fan is at his glowering worst and plays Yan as a cardboard-cutout super-detective, all nervous tics and incivility. Although Yan was also obnoxious in Burning Ice, Qin Hao managed to develop some empathy for the character. Captain Ren and her colleagues never develop beyond the standard police team tropes.

Although there are a lot of female characters, men play all the main roles with women reduced to stock parts. Tan Zhou appears as Li Jing in a role that never develops into anything. The Crossing’s Huang Yao also features as an investigative journalist but again has little to do. Captain Ren gets stuck with the obnoxious Yan who she puts up with for no very obvious reason. Worst of all, the woman whose death sparks the entire events (and her colleagues) hardly get a look-in. So an opportunity to raise issues of gender exploitation is largely wasted.

It’s shot in and around Chongqing (nominally Jiangtan city) but, unlike Burning Ice, the film makers just use the city as a backdrop.

There was some discussion of making a follow up to 2017’s Burning Ice series but this fell through and so Yan Liang reappears in a different part of China and embodied by a different (and even more surly) actor.

I have no idea why iQiYi chose completely different English and Chinese names for all these series, though the English titles are often the original book titles (as left) while the Chinese drama titles are different (while Burning Ice is the opposite!).