Text 丨Mr. Infamous
Douban score is stable at 7.0 of the "Uninvited Guest", is a suspense film that can be flattered at both ends, inexperienced audiences will find it not difficult to understand, the threshold for experiencing suspense stimulation is not high or low, and harsh reasoning fans may also pay for its seven or eight reversals from beginning to end.
In short, it is both intimate and intuitive, but also playable.
The kindness is because every character category in the story does not create a threshold for the audience to understand. Old Li (Fan Wei) is a thief who finds the dead "mistress" Lily (Zhu Zhu), the "murderer" Yan Zheng (Zhang Songwen), the "delivery man" Ma Mingming (Dou Xiao), the "kidnapping victim" You Dacheng (Liang Chao), the "boss" Zhang Yaozhong (Hu Ming), and the "thug" Shrimp Mao (Gao Shang).
The "identity" that is the first to be revealed, the loyal and the adulterous have a clear correspondence, which is vaguely in that dilapidated and dim unit, allowing the brain to make up a simple story.
So the interesting thing is that these face characters will constantly change their faces after repeated reversals, and the original appearance and direction of the story will also be completely transformed in the patchwork bit by bit.
As a result, the film has a rather strong sense of suspense. The identity of each character is vague, the target is hidden, and the audience suddenly finds that they have lost the omniscient perspective in the single-line narrative film, but need to get clues in the interaction of the characters, make judgments, and follow the absolute main perspective of the character Lao Li to spell out the truth. In the process of this frequent reversal, the audience's perception is constantly revised until the dust of the final answer is settled.
"Uninvited Guest" is really a fairly typical "frequent reversal" story. Its methods are mainly reflected in the following aspects.
First, identity reversal. Lily is not only a mistress, but also superimposed on the identity of a fraudster and a fortune seeker, and the tragedy of her unexpected death has been erased. Yan Zheng is not only not a murderer, but also a policeman who will stop at nothing to save his daughter, and his suffering has great significance.
Second, the choice is reversed. Old Li just came to steal, only to find that the lives of a group of children were in his hands when he was protecting himself, and in order to implement the rescue, he chose to take the risk, and the biggest arc of the movie character appeared on him.
Third, fate is reversed. "Uninvited guests" means all kinds of unexpected interventions, each person's plan is therefore contained by the other party, and the good and evil of nature determine that they make different choices, and also lead to a fundamental reversal of fate in a short period of time.
In this process, the audience's emotional projection on the characters is also changing. Identity reversal leads to more changes in likes and dislikes, choice reversal brings shocking experience, fate reversal orientation is frequently generated, and the audience's sense of substitution and identity is rooted in this.
Judging from the word-of-mouth and box office performance, the audience still buys this small-cost film of the new director Liu Xiang. But at present, obsessed with frequent reversals, why not liu xiang?
Speaking of which, we can go back a rough way. From Alfred Hitchcock, who is revered as the "master of suspense", Billy Wilder, who is regarded as the "originator of reversal", to well-known directors such as Guy Richie and Christopher Nolan, who began to lead the way around the turn of the century, we can easily read many classic suspense movies full of reversal bridges.
Two Big Smoking Guns
Within this span alone, there is already an inexhaustible pool of "reversal" techniques that are talked about by future filmmakers, ranging from structural frameworks and thematic ideas to puns and detailed foreshadowing.
The domestic director who "learned" the fastest and most skillfully had to be counted as Ning Hao. In 2006, a "Crazy Stone" directly blew up the field of the mainland film industry. Many fans directly linked it to "Two Big Smoking Guns", pride and excitement, at that time the high box office of 25.34 million yuan, but also let other filmmakers and the film market see the winning doorway of relying on multi-line narrative to build a reverse maze. Compared with the relative silence of the creation of suspense films in the last century, in the past 20 years, the mainland market has indeed had a very different scenery.
Crazy Stone, Crazy Stone
Not to mention the commercial productions such as the "Tang Detective" series, which is in the top ten of the total box office, the focus of many new directors has fallen on the exquisite craftsmanship of the script. How to elaborate, it is mainly reflected in frequent reversals. In particular, some scripts that need to obtain venture capital, as well as some films with only low creative funds, need to win more recognition and breakthrough through the complexity of the narrative.
Xin Yukun's "Labyrinth of Hearts", Rao Xiaozhi's "The Unknown Generation", Li Yuhe's "Carrying The Heart and Hanging the Guts", Li Fei's "Destiny Express", Lian Xin's "Liar Hunter", Xiao Yifan's "Dragon Gate Phase", Liu Xiang's "Uninvited Guest" and other movies have successively embarked on the road of frequent reversals.
Among them, there are also differences. For example, stories such as "The Unknown Generation", "Hanging on to the Heart", and "Uninvited Guest" are through multi-line narratives, stringing some people who are not related to each other to the same major event, thus giving rise to various reversals, creating black humor or meticulous suspense. The "Dragon Gate Phase" is biased towards the counterproductive progression of writing things, to continue to reverse the character tasks and fatal endings of the characters.
The Unknown
However, interesting is interesting, but also to see that the reputation of many movies is not satisfactory. Even Xin Yukun and Rao Xiaozhi, who have reaped great success, the former has not taken over the baton for many years, and the latter launched the suspense film "Surging Crowds" in this year's Spring Festival file" "reversed for the sake of reversal", which exposed the identity of the protagonist Zhou Quan (Andy Lau), which ruined the appetite of many audiences, not to mention that many directors were still in the initial stage of crossing the river by touching the stones of their predecessors when they launched their works.
The fortunate thing about Liu Xiang and "Uninvited Guest" is that because the foundation is not bad and the marketing is appropriate, even under the suppression of "Changjin Lake" and "Dune", it can also get relatively good scheduling, box office and word of mouth, and this has outperformed many peers who run together.
But correspondingly, the film has some people marveling at the complexity of the narrative labyrinth, and some people hate the fatigue of frequent reversals, and it highlights the pros and cons of this creative model.
Let's start with the good aspects.
The investment in creation focuses on the technical performance, fixing the audience focus with a fast-frequency strong plot, and correspondingly reducing the cost of personnel, sets, and installations. Liu Xiang cleverly took the small cost to the extreme. The main scene of the whole film is a house in a dilapidated small building. This building is sparsely populated, and the time when the story takes place is at night, it can not only create a horror atmosphere, but also eliminate the interference of unrelated personnel on the story.
The existence of the residential gate makes the appearance of the major characters have a controllable order. The four-fold suspense of who comes in, when, how to come in, and why comes in is constantly thrown out, constantly refreshing the existing character relationships and character fates. The doors, cabinets, and even sofas, freezers, and beds that obscure the view of the house are all amplifying the tolerance and malleability of this narrow space as a movie scene.
The second advantage is that Liu Xiang, who has a complete understanding of this space, can easily narrate the same thing and the same person repeatedly by presenting different perspectives, creating a new sense of strangeness while adding layers of characters and realizing the vision of controlling the complex story structure.
From this, the third advantage is led, that is, through the stacking of reversals, the suspense line is lengthened, so that the audience can carry out immersive thinking with more concentrated attention, to obtain more participation experience, and the film is also driven by this consciousness to achieve the level and strength of narrative ambition.
However, when showing the potential of its own control field to the outside world, the drawbacks of frequent reversals are inevitably exposed.
The first is its inevitable routine. The relative low cost of such films has prompted creators to take root in towns and villages to lay out stories. Moreover, in different stories, there are frequent appearances of some similar characters, such as policemen, thieves, small bosses, migrant workers,, tool beauties, etc., which on the whole, it has caused a certain aesthetic fatigue.
The second cross-section of the routine, the first impression or stereotype of the main character, must be subverted. Then, in the first half of the story, the audience who is familiar with the number of roads may not have sufficient curiosity to support them to participate in this so-called "exploration", and even, they can use the opposite logic to take the end of the story in advance.
The second point of the disadvantage, that is, the author's seemingly blank way, just puts an end to the possibility of blank space. The audience thinks that they are participating in the narrative, essentially following the author's settings, to go through one step after another. Just like the script killing and the escape room, it is necessary to let everyone go through the established route step by step and get the emotional experience that the author intends. Under this premise, frequent reversals may become a kind of fool, so that the audience will have psychological rebellion in an increasingly tired state.
Moreover, "reversing for the sake of reversing" would be the fatal weak point of this type of film. This will not only provoke the "Surging Crowds" rout, but also put the pressure of the whole film on the ending. Hollywood has a "golden rule" before, where movies focus on the last twenty minutes. If the creator's skill is weak, the whole movie is easy to fall short.
"Uninvited Guest" rushed to the end in laughter and anger, and a major climax was to find that the business of Boss Zhang and You Dacheng was actually abducting children to become beggars, which admittedly made Lao Li's confrontation have a sublimation trend, but the temperament and style of the film itself also underwent a major reversal, such a sense of separation, and it is also harmful to the overall film.
The worst phenomenon is that the author's reversal syndrome in many cases, in fact, they are trying to divert the attention of the tool, especially when the concept of the story is not fresh enough, the character setting is not attractive enough, the reversal of this action, will be pushed as the "protagonist" of the narrative, and blindly care about the spectacle of the plot, ignore the character setting and behavior logic, directly declare the essence of the film empty and vacuous.
In the current "post-truth" era, surrounded by explosive information, we have long been corrupted by the "reverse news", if the suspense film can not be between love and reason, put away the mentality of blindly playing with the audience, and spend energy on building a reasonable and exciting sophisticated text, to meet the audience's curiosity, shock, identification and other emotional catharsis, I am afraid that the acceptance of this type of film will be lower and lower.
Since there are more and more suspense films and better and better box office performance, it is not a trend to cater to the ingenuity to override independent design, stylization to override logical reasoning, and tool design to override the subtlety of human nature.