Star Lost
So close yet so far. If only Cui Rui and Liu Xiang’s surprise pulp thriller hit had just a bit more bite.
Lost in the Stars
Directors: Cui Rui, Liu Xiang • Writers: Chen Sicheng, Gu Shuyi, based on the play by Robert Thomas
Starring: Zhu Yilong, Ni Ni, Janice Man, Du Jiang, Kay Huang, Chen Mengqi, Scotty Bob Cox
China • 2hrs 2mins
Opens Hong Kong August 24 • IIB
Grade: B-
In Lost in the Stars | 消失的她 diving instructor He Fei (discount Tony Leung, Zhu Yilong, 1921) and his wife, Li Muzi (Kay Huang), go to a luxurious resort on exotic, tropical Barlandia (?) to celebrate their anniversary. But when he wakes up one morning and his wife is most definitely not his wife (now she looks like Janice Man Wing-san, The Midnight After), his world starts to spiral. He gets no help from the police, even the initially sympathetic Chinese cop in Barlandia, or a Chinese-Barlandan (?) cop, it’s unclear, Zheng Cheng (Du Jiang, Operation Red Sea), so he hires hotshot celebrity lawyer Chen Mai (Ni Ni, Wu Kong, Shock Wave 2) to help him find out who’s gaslighting him and why. It’s the tip of a very large conspiracy iceberg that involves murder, money and revenge, and Fei only has four days to figure out what’s going on.
The gaslighting that makes everyman Fei more and more frantic each passing hour is the stuff of Hitchcock, so it comes as no surprise to find Hitchcock at one time optioned the rights to adapt Robert Thomas’s 1960 play, Trap for a Lonely Man, into a film. That never happened, but Alexey Korenev managed a Soviet comedy in 1990 (A Trap for a Lonely Man). Guess it’s third time lucky because Cui Rui (making his first feature after working in VFX) and sophomore director Liu Xiang (Knock Knock) turned writers Chen Sicheng (Detective Chinatown series) and relative newcomer Gu Shuyi’s spin on the story into a surprise US$500 million grosser at home in China. Lost in the Stars is a ridiculous slab of pulpy wannabe-noir mystery thriller, replete with femme fatales, double-crosses, and lunatic plot twists. It would be great Hitchcockian fun had it not dropped the thematic ball in the closing frames, but hey. Did we expect anything else?
Lawyer, not detective
The less you know about Lost in the Stars going in the better, but it’s safe to say it’s on a par with nutty thrillers like Steven Knight’s bonkers Serenity and Robert Rodriguez’s even more bonkers Hypnotic, and Chen and Gu must be credited for going all in on the silliness. There’s a fine line to ride in twisty thrillers like this: Underplay it and none of the surprises land. Overplay and you get, well, Serenity. Chen and Gu come very close to finding the balance, partly because the (mostly) strong cast plays it straight. Like many of Hitchcock’s great Wrong Man in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time, He Fei’s tumble from disbelief and suspicion into confusion and borderline madness is the engine that drives the story. Now, Zhu isn’t quite up to the task – he’s game but his idea of demonstrating mounting stress is a hilarious eye tic – but Ni and Man – who has a fantastic ice cold manipulator mode – pick up the slack. They both know what’s going on in the onion peel narrative and they both know how to navigate the stylish surroundings to the ludicrous core.
The action really picks up when Fei, convinced in his very soul that his wife is the wrong wife, is proven wrong and humiliated at every turn while trying to prove to his sole ally, Zheng, she’s been kidnapped. He turns to Chen for help after seeing her blow some courtroom to pieces in a quest for justice and she rescues his ass from some local thugs. She’s reluctant to help at first, but his sad eyes win her over and they start digging into the island’s criminal underworld. At the same time, Fei’s shady past rears its ugly head. None of that’s a spoiler; shady pasts are SOP in thrillers like this. And we learn early on that Muzi’s an heiress, and Fei’s a poor.
From there it’s off to the races, but pull on a thread and the whole thing unravels – even if you see the twists coming (you probably will). There are structural issues to contend with. When, oh when, are filmmakers going to stop flashing back to something that happened 20 minutes earlier during the course of grand reveals? Are they afraid we fell asleep? If that’s the case work on your pacing. Don’t subject me to something I just watched. If Muzi is missing, why does Fei call a lawyer? Wouldn’t a private dick be more appropriate? Without saying anything – how do the bad guys manage the logistics of these elaborate schemes?
There is some twisty-turny fun to be had in Lost in the Stars, even if its multiple third act reveals threaten to overload the narrative and tip the whole thing over into dumb nonsense, not amusing nonsense. The biggest crime is not sticking the landing. The original source material was by a French playwright, and a Soviet filmmaker found traction in the story. Are we really supposed to believe there wasn’t more nihilism in the offing? — DEK