"Great Night": Domestic films finally combine comedy and thriller

April 1, 2023 | Issue 3192

In the "milestone" statistics of Maoyan Pro, "Great Night", which was released nationwide yesterday (March 31), rushed into the forefront of both the "annual thriller list" and the "annual comedy list". This is an extremely rare phenomenon.

Although Hollywood once gave birth to the well-known "Scream" series, the integration of comedy and thriller has always been very difficult to produce in domestic movies. Can "The Great Night", written and directed by young director Ma Kai and starring Fan Chengcheng, Jiang Long, Jiang Yi and others, be successful?

01

Comedy and thriller are both one of the oldest genres of cinema. The film genre is particular about "provide something", that is, to provide the audience with some kind of psychological satisfaction. These ancient genres have gone through decades and countless market feedbacks to explore the most effective character settings, narrative methods, and video techniques in providing psychological satisfaction.

As a commercial film that meets the audience's main demands, the genre base must be clear and clear. If you want to put multiple genres into the same film to innovate and integrate, you must not be egalitarian. As Chen Yu, screenwriter of "Manjiang Hong" and professor at Peking University's School of Arts, explains: ""Manjiang Hong" is a clear and determined suspense film genre in my heart. Here, comedy is not a genre concept, but the third label introduced. ”

The most successful thing about "Great Night" is that Makay also clearly identified its comedy genre in his heart, and then introduced thriller as an element into it.

Three brothers who do video self-media, in order to save the company that is about to go bankrupt, went deep into the movie set to secretly shoot. After they caused a lot of accidents, the filming process of the film gradually got out of control. This story line is a very standard comedy base.

And the introduction of thriller elements is because this set is shooting a costume thriller "The Legend of Concubine Li".

02

After identifying the primary and secondary positions of comedy and thriller, there is a second question: why not do a fusion of horror as the base and comedy as the introduction of elements?

This is related to the dependence of the two major types on atmosphere.

Relatively speaking, genres such as thriller, suspense, horror, and reasoning rely heavily on atmosphere creation. And most of their atmospheres are serious, mysterious, depressing, and dignified, and if you rashly introduce comedy elements that make people relaxed, joyful and released, they will often break the atmosphere that has been painstakingly created and make the audience play.

For example, Zhang Yimou previously changed the Coen brothers' "Blood Labyrinth" to "Three Guns Shooting Surprise", which is to forcibly introduce Northeast comedy on the basis of the original thriller and suspense story, giving people a sense of mixed tastes. In contrast, comedy-based "Get Out!" "Tumor Jun" introduced a terrifying "zombie attack", which not only did not ruin the comedy atmosphere, but also brought unexpected refreshment to the audience.

Therefore, it doesn't matter if the atmosphere of the comedy base is broken occasionally; The thriller and suspense atmosphere, broken may really break.

The comedy base of "Great Night" is not yet "Get Out!" The flow of life like "Tumor Jun" is a hilarious flow with more concentrated time and space, more diverse characters, and a greater plot density. In this hilarious comedy atmosphere, the audience is more tolerant of the introduction of various imaginative elements.

03

It is precisely because Ma Kai built such a stage based on hilarious comedy, so "Great Night" provides a lot of space for directors and actors to play.

Ma Kai's famous work "Zhong Evil" is a thriller in the form of a pseudo-documentary, using a DV perspective throughout. Although "Great Night" is not a pseudo-documentary, it still uses a lot of first-person perspective, follow-up perspective, and candid perspective, enriching the form of lens expression and creating a good sense of immersion in the thriller paragraph.

In addition, he patiently schedules the thriller passages to a certain extent.

Netizens often ridicule that domestic thrillers are scary only one trick - the sudden appearance of female ghosts. Due to censorship and cost, domestic thrillers have indeed relied too much on this trick in the past few years, and the difference is only that the female ghost in white and the female ghost in red are just that.

"The Great Night" is not a pure thriller, and Makay does not need to stack thriller scenes densely. The three "female ghosts" in the film have long been clearly played by Concubine Li (played by Wang Zixuan), Concubine Li's stand-in Jiajia (played by Xu Xinwen), and the monkey (played by Jiang Yi) in the self-media trio.

In the film, one of the "female ghosts" is often first shot at the audience as an actor, and then another "female ghost" appears in an perverse way, which really scares the audience. For example, the first fright of Concubine Li appearing in mid-air is false, and others find that Concubine Li suspended in mid-air is not hanging Wei Ya's second fright.

Another example is the previous shooting, the posture of the stand-in version of the female ghost climbing towards the hill (played by Jiang Long) and Dou (played by Kong Lianshun) is normal; In the next shooting, the pose of the "resurrection" female ghost climbing towards the hill and bean becomes weird...

04

One of the things that is so magical about "Great Night" is that it allows actors from different performance systems to collide and not contradict each other.

The time is limited to one night and the space is limited to the film and television city, which fits the "three-in-one" structure on the theater stage. And the starring Jiang Long, Jiang Yi, and Jiang Shimeng are all stage comedy masters who have been tested by the "Annual Comedy Competition". Their acting style and acting experience easily carry over most of the passages of the play.

Gan Yunchen, who plays a dog, and Wang Zixuan, who plays Concubine Li, both graduated from the acting department of the Beijing Film Academy and belong to the class. Their performances are relatively stable, and when their emotions explode, they do not use brute force, and they shoulder the task of igniting the theme of friendship and dreams.

Fan Chengcheng, who played the "leading big brother" leopard of the media trio, and Xu Xinwen, who played a stand-in, were both trainees. Their idol-like image was overexposed, and they violently subverted the external image in the film. Fan Chengcheng not only gained 30 pounds, but also put on a mustache, visually older than Gan Yunchen, who was 12 years older than him. Xu Xinwen is even a female ghost makeup + Sichuan dialect throughout the process, completely blocking the sweetness and cuteness on the stage.

Liang Long, who plays the director, and Kong Lianshun, who plays the dou, are known and loved by people, to a large extent, due to many amazing cameos in the past. They are good at quickly highlighting labels and contrasts on characters. The director played by Liang Long, although somewhat labeled, is the standard-bearer of this hilarious journey. If there is no such a crushing formation, a group of young people acting too flying, it may really become a farce. Although Kong Lianshun did not reverse the string, he played a "eunuch" with a rough voice, which still continued the sense of contrast that everyone liked to see.

Although "Great Night" is still jerky in details and the sensationalism at the end is not smooth enough, it is undoubtedly on the right path in genre integration, showing the active and keen creative thinking of new directors and actors.

【Text/Full Hoard】