Chen Zho's new The Invisible Guest/Man tian guo hai has had a success in its Chinese home market. Well, we know that, while failure is an orphan, success has many parents. Turns out that this one is the offspring of Oriol Paulo's 2016 Contratiempo, the biggest-earning Spanish film yet to play in China, which has been transcribed here with a sex change but still retaining its slick production values. While it was not all that impressive in the Hispanic original, Contratiempo has also subsequently been re-birthed in South Korea as Confession, Il Testimone Invisibile in Italy and as the Indian Badla, along with Evaru, a Telugu variation.
If you want to go back further into the lineage you can say giallo thrillers and yes (well everyone has) Hitchcock and Dial M. For Murder, with not a little of the nastiness of Agatha Christie.
We kick off with an obviously digital wide shot of a resort hotel in the jungle. The sub-titles version is not location specific but we get a couple of monkeys and the police all speak English while the cast perform in Mandarin.
The narrative keeps on twisting back and forward as sleazy cop (current heart throb) Greg Han Hsu extorts glamorous Janine Chung-Ning Chan, philanthropist new wife of the heir to an industrial empire, over the locked room murder of her former lover, with whose blood covered body she was found in a hotel suite. The price goes up as he dumps more damning documentary evidence on the table and she shifts ground in describing the back story of the guilty couple's responsibility in the killing of a local businessman, with whom they had had a traffic accident on the way to their illicit rendez vous. Now a body is missing and Kara Wai, the man's grieving widow craves revenge. Lies accumulate and are exposed. Flash backs reveal lots of visceral stuff with the characters soaked in rain, mud and blood.
The Invisible Guest's texture is polished, with gleaming luxury contrasted with the meager circumstances of the working class characters, and there are flourishes like the exaggerated sound effects as material is produced or the jagged montages of incidents recalled. Han Hsu walks in front of the lettering of the main title on his way to the appointment. The count down to the release of incriminating proof is shown at intervals, as a screen display, but they forget about that. This recalls the tech-savvy detail that characterised the Spanish film.
Director Chen Zhuo was in the cast of Feng Xiaogang's 2007 Ji jie hao/ Assembly. The leads may prove useful juveniles. The Witness for the Prosecution twist did take me in. Here they are stuck with being glamorous. Despite its showy qualities, the film is a discouraging glimpse of what the Chinese industry considers popular entertainment.
