Dead To Rights Review: Brutal Nanjing Massacre Movie Mixes Historical Truth With Terrifying Drama

Dead To Rights (NC16)

Starring Liu Haoran, Wang Chuanjun, Gao Ye, Daichi Harashima, Wang Xiao

Directed by Ao Shen

This is the patriotic, horrific, relentlessly brutal Nanjing Massacre film that reportedly made even kids in China so vengeful they wanna attack the Japanese.

A crying baby is slammed onto the ground by a callous Japanese soldier who shoots it dead. The body is handed to a trembling Chinese couple to hold for a happy “Sino-Japanese friendship” photo in the occupied city in 1937. “Smile,” they're ordered.

This utterly shocking segment, amid scenes of wanton murder, rape and carnage in the blood-soaked streets and mass massacre of civilians next to a bloody river, makes this pic so tough to watch you'd feel fear right in your seat.

Liu Haoran (Detective Chinatown series), plays A-chang, a humane postman pretending to be a photograph developer for a distrustful Japanese military photographer, Lieutenant Hideo Ito (Daichi Harashima), who wields the power of life or death over him and a group of people hiding in the secret basement of a photo studio. The enemy officer, eager to please his ruthless superiors with wonderful shots, including censored atrocities, of their stupendous victory, is the almighty authority who issues life-saving exit passes out of the barricaded city.

The real studio owner-developer, Lao Jin (Wang Xiao), and his family huddle underground with an escaped Chinese soldier, Sergeant Song (Zhou You). A Shanghainese opera singer, Lin Yuxiu (the superb Gao Ye), poses as A-chang's wife while her married lover, Wang Guanghai (Wang Chuanjun), schemes personal survival as a translator-collaborator for the enemy.

Right in this microcosm of stragglers are the complexities of the era since “Chinese people are just like scattered sand, never united”. The arguments between the illicit couple, Wang and Lin, about loyalty and survivors' guilt towards their homeland are truly fascinating.

Anytime, these besieged captives can be caught and executed. All the time, you, the viewer, are scared. And yes, you'd wanna take revenge too.

“Chinese are pigs, don't think of them as human,” goes the zero-mercy Imperial Japanese Army command as people are shot, bayoneted, beaten and burned alive far worse than pigs. Compassion is shown. To a dog found among dead bodies.

FYI. The term “Dead to rights” means “in the act of doing something wrong or illegal”.

And PRC director/co-writer Ao Shen, who helmed the riveting No More Bets, is a great filmmaker-storyteller to push all the right buttons to expose this massive historical wrongdoing.

So how much of these unbelievable atrocities depicted here are CCP propaganda and how much of it is true?

Here's the verdict.

Clearly and evidently, this is truth — photographic truth — fictionalised by a compelling, suffocating drama which captures all that’s necessary to remind, emote, evoke and stir mainland patriotism and hence, anti-Japanese sentiment. The loading of film into a camera is as blasé as the loading of a bullet into a rifle, while there's absolutely no good Japanese in this tale.

Truth can be painful. It pains badly for unspeakable wrongdoers.

And in the hands of a skilful narrator like director Ao, Dead To Rights is a terrific, terrifying moving film fronted by excellent acting, high tension, gross horror, sheer bravery and an inspirational will to live.

Ao cleverly juxtaposes his in-living-colour drama with actual barbaric black-and-white photos from WWII. It gives a modern visual look to this flick which ameliorates the stark terror in a reverse way whereby monochrome turned Schindler's List into virtually a docu-drama.

Two real-life Japanese officers who collected heads in a head-chopping competition pose for a photo here alongside gruesome factual photos of the beheaded.

Here, you marvel at Ao's expertise in making this a story about bygone memories recorded forever in graphic stills. The survivors plot to smuggle out the damning pictorial evidence gathered by A-chang secretly behind Ito's back to reveal to the outside world. In reality, a hidden album of ghastly photos was apparently submitted after the war in 1946 to convict the war criminals.

Dead To Rights does go too PRC-movie nationalistic as it rushes to its payback conclusion. An emotional “Our beautiful motherland” changing display of China’s proud landmarks as photo-studio backdrops is designed to bring teary-eyed audiences to their feet.

Now, director Ao Shen himself is a landmark of significant proportion.

In this film about China's dark sorrow, he is a perfect chronicler of bright truth. (4/5 stars)

Photo: Shaw Organisation