Cat-and-mouse tension is a fundamental pillar of any espionage film. What elevates it above your typical thriller with similar mechanics, such as I Saw the Devil or, more recently, The Shadow’s Edge, is the way those lines blur once spies enter the picture. With double or even triple agents in play, who is the cat and who is the mouse becomes fluid, constantly shifting. That fluidity is essential, and you would hope that Zhang Yimou’s Scare Out, his first venture into contemporary national-security storytelling, would embrace it. Instead, the film is a seizure-inducing nightmare, a barrage of cuts leaving no room to breathe.
Where does one even begin to describe the plot? Even now, I’m struggling to remember the core concept, despite the film’s desperate attempts to burn its narrative into my brain with rapid-fire cuts. Scare Out’s atrocious editing feels less like it was assembled by someone smashing a keyboard against a wall and calling it a day. It has more in common with the theatrics of a DJ’s lighting than a traditional narrative feature. I commented at the beginning that the film cuts after every sentence, thinking I was being hyperbolic, but as the film went on, it became clear that this wasn’t exaggeration at all, just a harsh reality.
Especially for non-Mandarin-speaking audience members, the harsh editing makes both reading the subtitles and watching the film practically impossible. If you can read the subtitles and watch the visuals simultaneously, you might experience an epileptic fit. Everything I managed to grasp about the narrative could be boiled down to a few sentences: Huang Kai (Zhu Yilong) and Yan Di (Jackson Yee) are members of the national security team, tasked with hunting down spies leaking classified information. As the film progresses, the higher-ups begin to suspect there may be a mole within the team, with Huang Kai and Yan Di becoming the prime suspects.
As Scare Out progresses and more narrative beats reveal themselves, the lines begin to blur, and my understanding blurs alongside them. The film’s biggest sin is just being boring; there’s no tension, no drama, nothing remotely enticing. Even in a scene where Huang Kai is avoiding surveillance cameras, which should have you on the edge of your seat as human intelligence outsmarts digital systems, you feel absolutely nothing, which is a strange thing to say about a Zhang Yimou film. Given that Hero and Shadow are visually and mythologically spectacular, I was genuinely perplexed by how incompetent this one felt.
Even if the film wasn’t edited to hell and back, the cinematography is completely flat. No shot is visually absorbing or remotely dynamic. It’s as if they stuck three cameras in a room, hit record, and hoped for the best. The result is a series of scenes where it often feels like the characters aren’t even in the same room. Even during action sequences, the camera never engagingly captures those moments. There are fleeting moments of fun drone photography, complete with AI pathing overlays, that briefly offer genuinely striking visuals, but they’re gone as quickly as they appear.
Despite featuring Jackson Yee, who delivered the performance of a lifetime in last year’s Resurrection, his work here is surprisingly middle-of-the-road, even though Yan Di is arguably the more complex of the two leads. Zhu Yilong, meanwhile, leans into a far more melodramatic register. You could argue that Yee’s performance is more subdued, but the clash between the two creates a tonal inconsistency that the film never resolves. It makes me wonder if Scare Out was aiming to be an Infernal Affairs-style melodramatic thriller, or something closer to Black Bag, which drips with style and confidence while still feeling grounded?
Scare Out is a true disappointment of seismic proportions. Over-edited, visually flat, weakly performed, and narratively confusing, it should have been a gripping contemporary thriller. Instead, when the strongest element of your film ends up being the three songs that blare during supposedly important moments, you’re left wondering what, if anything, this film had to offer.
★
In UK Cinemas from February 17th / Jackson Yee, Zhu Yilong, Song Jia, Lei Jiayin, Yang Mi / Dir: Zhang Yimou / Trinity CineAsia / 15
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