Interlaced Scenes (2024)

Murder He Wrote.

After an injury related leave of absence, veteran detective Jiang Guangming teams up with rookie Shi Luo to tie up a few perplexing loose ends in a murder case. Shi Luo is a crime fiction junkie and notices that the crime scene is disturbingly similar to one described in Gu Jiming's debut hit novel Black Rain. Is it a bizarre Murder He Wrote type of coincidence or is the author somehow complicit? The plot thickens when they discover Gu Jiming is not the only writer with links to the victim or the crime scene. The list of suspects grows as they delve deeper into the incestuous and cut throat literary world of aspiring and established writers and their messy personal lives.

The murder mystery is riveting from the onset as the search for a missing dog becomes a hunt for a missing witness. As they hone in on the main antagonist, the narrative morphs into a police procedural and a terrifying, gut wrenching exploration of man's quest for relevance. For Zhenzhen and Guangming it is about being in control; for Jiming and Tang Xun it was about writing that memorable first and last novel. All too easily, they slip down the path of moral decay in their pursuit of what matters to them. Even though I was fascinated by this dark and cynical treatise on human nature and how toxic relationships can get, I didn't like or root for any of the characters in this story.

I always regarded Tong Dawei as an overrated actor but I was floored by his compelling portrayal of the pitiful, conflicted and ultimately selfish character that is Gu Jiming. I also was surprised by his dark chemistry with Su Zhenzhen and how they fed off each other. While I appreciate the attempt to flesh out Guangming's character and to somehow connect her marital problems to the case, I was bored by her relationship arc. Despite Ma Yili's fantastic acting, the great cop terrible wife plot-line is unoriginal and went on for too long; often disrupting the flow and pacing of the main narrative. The final two episodes are quite anti-climatic but its still overall an excellent suspense thriller. This could have been a much tighter and more engrossing watch had they cut it down to 10-12 episodes. I rate this an excellent 8.0/10.0.

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Don't go looking where you don't belong

Interlaced Scenes is an unusual crime drama that managed to scratch a very deep and persistent itch. Rarely do I find a mystery thriller that offers only a dash of grittiness rather than the whole shaker. The main character is not some gruff, self-sabotaging genius on the warpath for justice, and the villain is no moustache twirler calibrated to piss you off. Instead, nuanced characters with rich interiority live in a world often saturated with warm, natural light. There are scenes of dreariness, of course, but the contrast allowed some genuinely beautiful moments to shine through from the muck. When I look back, those are the moments that I will remember.

SYNOPSIS

Veteran detective Jiang Guang Ming is hastily summoned back from desk duty to shore up a murder case awaiting trial. While she investigates several loose ends including the missing murder weapon and a runaway dog, rookie Shi Luo becomes obsessed with the eerie resemblance between the crime scene and the opening pages of a best-selling mystery novel. As past facts unravel, the author gradually turns from a wild lead to a likely suspect.

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Minor spoiler of first 8 episodes below...
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The blurring of fact and fiction is interesting enough of a hook for driving suspense, but about half way through the drama the brutal whodunnit is suddenly resolved and the investigation transitions into a missing-person case. Murder fades into context, and the hook lingers only as a few unanswered questions. Even the detectives themselves find the development rather anticlimactic.

Here is where the drama makes a daring turn, in my opinion, from generic crime thriller into meta commentary. Not in a cynical, fourth-wall-breaking kind of way, but with frank discussions about how empathy is more than just words, how desire for approval poisons the psyche, and how stories of crime obscure the countless societal failings that led to those abhorrent acts of desperation.

While the storytelling can be masterful at keeping viewers in suspense, I found that the drama's best moments were when it dropped the guise of a mystery thriller altogether. Thanks to strong performances by the veteran cast, the narrative never loses momentum even as the truth becomes apparent in the final arc. Instead, the release of tension gives space for those seeds of turmoil planted within each character to flower into nobility or violence.

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