This mystery drama twist-a-thon from China was a huge hit on home turf recently (far outperforming the latest Indiana Jones feature) and has been picked up for distribution in the UK and the US. Although the 180-degree plot pivots start to get a little ridiculous by the end, the script (credited to writer-producer Chen Sicheng, Shuyi Gu and Yixiong Yin) zips along with such gleeful mischievousness that the ride is too fun to resist. Intriguingly, it is supposedly based on a 1990 Russian film called A Trap for Lonely Man, which was itself an adaptation of a stage play by French writer Robert Thomas for which Alfred Hitchcock once bought the rights. You can see traces of what Hitch might have liked about it, because it’s all about dopplegangers, femmes fatale and paranoia spoiling what should have been a nice holiday abroad.
The unlucky holidaymakers in this instance are Chinese couple He Fei (Yilong Zhu, in an outstandingly good performance) and his wife Li Muzi, who come to Belandia, a fictional south-east Asian island-nation, to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary. However, Li Muzi goes missing just days after they arrived. With his tourist visa about to run out, He Fei is first met frantically trying to convince the local police to look for her, but with little success.
When he wakes up in his hotel the next day, there’s a beautiful vampy woman there (Janice Man) who claims that she’s Li Muzi, but He Fei insists she’s an impostor, even if she has pictures on her phone, a passport and all the supposedly secret knowledge that supports her claim. Is He Fei, once a diving instructor, suffering from a neurological condition brought on by his line of work or is this woman a con artist? He hires local Mandarin-speaker Chen Mai (Ni Ni, also terrific) to help him investigate his wife’s disappearance and liaise between him and the cops. A tough cookie who drives like Lewis Hamilton and seems honest enough, Chen Mai insists that He Fei tell her the whole truth about the circumstances of his wife’s disappearance. Turns out he’s not been completely honest, of course, and directors Rui Cui and Xiang Liu start skilfully peeling back the onion.
The lightly stylised cinematography looks lush, and the pacing adroit, but as Lost in the Stars slides into full-on silliness in its last act, it also gets sticky with sentimentality, serving up soppy slow-tempo ballads in the background and a sob story for one of the main characters. Even so, the film goes to a pretty dark place in the last minutes, which is ballsy.
• Lost in the Stars is released on 14 July in UK cinemas, and is screening now in Australia.
