Sichuan-Yunnan Line, a long-distance bus to Chongqing.
The girl in the duck-tongue hat leaned against the window, and the male passenger next to her stared at her strangely, covered in cold sweat and shaking.
The man trembled and asked the girl, Have you ever been in a car accident before?
The girl was then plunged into memories.
Yes, she had been in a car accident. But how could the strange man next to him know?
There was no time to answer. In the next shot, the girl lies on a rocky rock and wakes up covered in bruises.
The bus she was riding rolled down the mountain road and fell into a river valley. There were 30 passengers and 1 driver on the bus, only 6 survived.
The trapped 6 people want to escape, but in the river valley, they encounter various strange supernatural phenomena:
Like a tidal wave, a huge torrent that rises and falls in the valley every day;
A deep cave where mysterious alarms sound in advance before the flood comes;
And the invisible "monsters" that hide in the turbid flood tide and drag the swimmers into the water-
All the survivors are trapped to death.
What secrets are hidden in the river valley?
Will the 6 survivors be able to escape?
As soon as the web drama "Missing Persons" began, it triggered countless suspense, and led the audience into a complex and suspenseful plot maze.
"Missing Persons" is the first work of Youku Suspense Theater, but it did not see much publicity on the Internet, and became an unpopular niche drama, and the number of netizens who scored on Douban did not exceed 3,000.
In the number of Douban short reviews, the words that appear most often are "surprise" and "eye light".
After brushing eight episodes in one breath, we went into the pit properly, and here we are also very responsible to tell you:
This drama, into the stock is not a loss!
Moreover, it also deserves more attention in itself. Because whether it is the genre, theme and narrative level, at the existing level of online drama, a breakthrough has been achieved.
When I first watched this play, I was a little surprised by its boldness.
The first is the genre, sci-fi + suspense.
Suspense web dramas have made efforts in recent years, and have also provided more choices for genre film lovers.
However, there are not many suspense dramas that incorporate soft science fiction elements.
Logical and smooth, while taking into account the good looks, less.
"Missing Persons" can organically combine the two, which is very rare.
The second is the story, although it is only 12 episodes, the story volume of "Missing Persons" is extremely large.
Horizontally, this is a group play.
Survivors of car accidents have their own personalities, choices, and histories, and each person's story is intertwined to form a panoramic portrait of Missing Persons.
In depth, each character's story spans the past, present and future.
Not to mention, it also employs a brain-burning, non-linear narrative.
Each storyline breaks the temporal coherence of each character, and perspectives constantly jump between their history and the present.
Like puzzles, watching the drama is like picking up the fragments of fate scattered in different time and space, and once they are sorted out and pieced together, a plump character full of details will also emerge.
As an original story, "Missing Persons" has a great test of the screenwriter's narrative skills.
This is not only a challenge to the creators, but also a challenge to the audience.
Under the fast-paced viewing habits, film and television works pursue efficiency and intensity:
Less foreshadowing, going straight to the subject, and providing enough stimulation and impact – seems to be the safest way to tell the story.
In contrast, "Missing Persons" has chosen a more abstract, complex, and slower story form.
Why did you choose this seemingly "thankless" narrative?
What is the moral behind this highly conceptual sci-fi suspense story?
To this end, we interviewed Wang Ruixin, the director and screenwriter of the series, and discussed the original intention of the creation of the drama, as well as the various doubts faced after the launch of the broadcast.
Before "Missing Persons", Wang Ruixin had followed Gu Xiaobai, the famous screenwriter of the show's supervising producer, and served as the screenwriter of the web drama "Psychological Crime".
Asked why he chose the science fiction genre, Wang Ruixin mentioned the impact of "Three-Body" on him.
"I always thought that science fiction was an imported product, a story that belonged to foreigners. "The Three-Body Problem" struck me a lot, and it made me believe that it was a science fiction story with Chinese as the protagonist, entering from Chinese perspective. ”
When conceiving "Missing Persons", Wang Ruixin decided to integrate some science fiction content on the basis of suspense. But he also emphasizes that the show's sci-fi elements follow an important premise:
"It has to be believed that this is a Chinese story first, and then a science fiction story."
Therefore, compared with suspenseful science fiction dramas, Wang Ruixin's more accurate style definition of "Missing Persons" is that science fiction, suspense and realism are -
The skin of science fiction, the texture of suspense, the core of realism.
The background is alternate, the plot is surreal, but the characters are really close to the land. They are the incisions that help the viewer get into the story.
The six protagonists, including policemen, doctors, journalists, and resident singers, are all images that are not unfamiliar to people, in the words of the director, "like our neighbors, relatives, friends."
They are also suffering from the most real dilemmas in real life:
Police officer Zou Zhiming (played by Liu Chang) desperately strives to be transferred from a household registration police officer to an anti-drug policeman, just to get rid of the same boring life;
Doctor Lu Min suffered from harassment and violence from her laid-off ex-husband, but what tormented her even more was the regret and blankness left by the death of her first love;
Singer Li Qiao (played by Chen Haoyu) has gained career success and new love, but has never been able to heal the emotional wounds caused by her ex-boyfriend's betrayal;
Tao Ziyou (played by Zhang Zhilu) has a crush on the female anchor of the network, but can only rely on stolen money to support the people he likes;
Donkey friend Chen Jian (played by Lu Yulai) grew up in an environment of lack of family affection, and was repeatedly abandoned by his father since he was a child.
All the characters are ordinary people who can be seen everywhere in reality, and they also have resonance points with other individuals.
Everyone encounters two dilemmas in the story, one is life, and the other is the mysterious river valley where the exit cannot be found.
The river valley is also an abstract metaphor for life itself, a succession of dangers, like the layers of containment they face in life.
The opposite of the predicament is escape.
The director admitted that the theme that "Missing Persons" wants to tell is escape.
In the story, Zou Zhiming and Li Qiao try to leave the river valley by all means, even in the face of the threat of strangers, the betrayal of others, and the dangerous environment from which there is nowhere to escape, they cannot choose to give up.
It's not so much a desire to survive as it is their desire for freedom.
But it is worth mentioning that the focus of the series is not the result of the escape, but the meaning of the escape itself.
Because under this action, there is Roman Rolland-style heroism.
Zou Zhiming escaped not only from the river valley, but also from the siege of a bleak life.
The director explains:
"In fact, they are all prisoners of life, desperately fighting, with nowhere to escape." The suspense cloak and science fiction elements attached to the play give them the logic to overcome life, making them the victors against life.
But life is difficult to break, for ordinary people, even in the face of life that cannot be broken, there is still courage to fight and escape. This courage is the most precious, the most moving, the most worthy of writing and showing, and it is also what this drama wants to tell. “
The story of "Missing Persons" is easily reminiscent of the American drama "Lost".
Because of a disaster, a group of people are trapped in a space dominated by supernatural forces, and "Lost" is also a non-linear narrative, with perspectives jumping back and forth between different time and space.
By flashing back to explain the previous history of the characters, the way of laying the plot is not unfamiliar to the audience.
But the boldness of "Missing Persons" is that it really calms down — the first five episodes spend most of the time laying the groundwork for the characters' history, and there's not much about the characters advancing in the valley.
There is no doubt that the ink of the previous history makes the characters fuller and more vivid. And the story design of this adventure also brought some controversy to the series.
In this regard, Wang Ruixin does not deny the challenges brought by the story of "Missing Persons" to the audience.
But at the same time, laying out the story is also necessary.
Playwright Arthur Miller once proposed such a creative concept: man is a synthesis of multiple time and space.
The story of Lost also develops from this: man lives in the present moment, but everything he does in the moment is because of what he has experienced. ”
Why the characters in "The Missing Persons" come to the river valley, how they will make choices in the moment, and what kind of fate they will encounter in the future, can find subtle clues and driving forces in the fragmented flashbacks.
The layout of the character's prehistory is like weaving a huge net, and everyone in the valley watched the satellite launch a year before the car accident, and also experienced an important moment in their lives that night, the rocket is the modern science exploring the unknown, these people are exploring the unknown territory of their hearts.
The first five episodes are ready, the sixth episode begins to close the net, the rhythm is steeply accelerated, and the story is pushed like a domino layer by layer, and it can't stop at all.
So after the slow-hot opening, it is a hearty puzzle and adventure.
And the refinement of each character actually hides the ambition of this drama.
Wang Ruixin revealed the possibility of "serialization" of "Missing Persons":
"After the end of the first season, these characters in the show can continue to produce and develop new stories, and even make a foreign drama with one of them as the protagonist. As for where you can go, it still depends on the acceptance of the audience. ”
Whether "Missing Persons" can launch a sequel is still unknown, it is certain that the emergence of this drama has provided a new creative direction for domestic suspense network dramas.
When it comes to the future development of suspense web dramas, Wang Ruixin believes that multi-genre mixing will become a new trend:
"Suspense dramas will be more combined with other genres, such as mixing with science fiction, realism, and love genres, it will be more complex, and the production can also incorporate more other types of thinking and ideas."
As a fan of drama, it is very happy to see the development of domestic web dramas, especially suspense web dramas.
From a series of recent works, we can feel the breakthrough of suspense drama in terms of genre, have greater tolerance in the theme, and can also accept more and more unique creative styles and self-expression belonging to young directors.
Of course, such a breakthrough and expression of the work also deserves more attention and support.
"Missing Persons" has currently aired 8 episodes, and the story is getting better, but the secrets of the river valley and the fate of the characters have not yet been revealed.
From the trailer, it seems that the future plot will continue to "increase", involving more sci-fi elements through time and space.
Let's look forward to it!