The Year of the Wild Goose

by Jason Adams

The latest crime-thriller from director Yi'nan Diao of Black Coal Thin Ice fame is hitting the streets of New York running on March 6th when The Wild Goose Lake opens at Film Forum -- for the rest of you, here in the US anyway, it's supposed to have a national roll-out from there. The film's already played a slew of international fests (Team Experience voted it one of the best Unreleased Films of 2019 with our annual awards) -- it premiered at Cannes last spring and by fall it was playing the New York Film Festival, which is where I saw it and reviewed it, calling it...

(Hey that's me!) The story's a Noir standard, kind of Fritz Lang's M meets The Warriors...

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NYFF: The color-filled noir of "The Wild Goose Lake"

by Jason Adams

Police officers close in on and surround a perp, their light-up dance sneakers blinking blue with every step. Hotel rooms half orange half pink, a sleepless phantasmagoria. A panicked streak through a zoo in the middle of night, flashes of light illuminating a tiger, an elephant, a succession of wild animal eyes in extreme close-up, blinking back madness. The Wild Goose Lake, the latest film from Black Coal Thin Ice director Yi'nan Diao, turns the crowded alleys and markets of Wuhan, Central China, into some sort of neon fever dream -- a riot of crime and color and scooter rides straight to hell, bang bang.

Starting off like a variation on The Warriors we first meet our characters gathered for an underground syndicate meeting -- everybody's come together to divide up the city, block by block, street by street...

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