Cock and Bull

Cao Baoping's most complete mystery thriller — in my book, it even edges out The Dead End.

The gap between The Dead End's source novel and its final cut is huge, and there were too many outside forces at play; the marks of censorship cuts are obvious, and that ending — the pivot from mystery into propaganda-adjacent uplift — reads like a forced compromise. Cock and Bull barely has any of that awkwardness. Its three-part structure follows Song Lao'er, Dong Xiaofeng, and the Wuxing/Cobra crew as they each chase after the same murder from their own angle, peeling the perspective back layer by layer until it all snaps together into one full, absurd, unflinching portrait of small-county life. The pacing holds, and the story is whole.

Cao Baoping's ruthless eye for small-time, low-rung characters, and his black comedy, are both on full display here, more so than usual: a manhunt that should be grim and heroic gets turned into a string of farcical mishaps — except underneath the farce, every single person is genuinely sliding toward the edge of a cliff. That's exactly what's hardest to pull off, and exactly what he's best at.

I still haven't seen Einstein and Einstein or The Equation of Love and Death — I'll get to them when I can.