Scare Out Review – Director Zhang Yimou’s twisty spy thriller delivers eye-catching stunts and futuristic technology | film

forIn the 1980s and 1990s, Zhang Yimou (Ju Du, Raise the Red Lantern) rose to fame as one of the most talented directors to emerge from China’s “fifth generation,” filmmakers whose work broke with the socialist realist style of their predecessors. While the fifth generation was still working within the establishment industry, they were viewed to varying degrees if not completely dissident, or at least somewhat innovative and anti-authoritarian. Either way, having started out as a cinematographer, Zhang quickly became a beloved artist overseas, revered for his lush visual style, his mastery of highly kinetic action sequences (as seen in wuxia masterpieces like Hero and House of Flying Daggers) and his eye for spotting and showcasing great actresses, like Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi.

Today, in a very different political and national landscape, Zhang no longer has the same heroic aura endearing to the West. He became a founding figure and chief architect of state-sponsored performances such as the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and the Winter Olympics. If, unlike Wim Wenders, you can’t quite separate politics from art, Chang’s latest, Scare Out, feels like pro-state propaganda, since it’s about spies trying to flush out a spy from among their ranks who is smuggling top-secret technology to nefarious Western rivals.

Considering that the screenplay credited to Chen Liang doesn’t have much to say about ideology or technology, except insofar as they help deliver all the bangs and whooshes the film wants to deliver. Ideology turns here into issues of personal loyalty to friends, spouses, and co-workers. Meanwhile, the top-secret military technology that is the film’s MacGuffin is far less important than all the drones and AI tools the spies use to track their enemies across the futuristic modern-day city of Shenzhen, where the film is set.

From the beginning, Scare Out presents a constant flurry of aerial shots, quick edits, and jumps back and forth between black-clad spies, initially under the command of Huang Kai (Zhu Yilong), who operates from a room full of flashing screens monitored by monotonous lines. Another group of spies, like Huang’s best friend Yan Di (Jackson Yee), are on the streets, stalking Westerners in tracksuits through the immaculate city center. The pre-publication hype for the film heightens the similarities to John le Carré; Presumably it’s due to the double agent elements, but cinematically, this looks more like a cross between Mission: Impossible and the Infernal Affairs franchise set in Hong Kong, the latter of which was remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed.

Scare Out doesn’t have the psychological depth that the first Infernal Affairs did, but Zhu is very watchable as a spymaster with secrets of his own who has an affair with sexy siren Bai Fan (Yang Mi). The last 15 minutes take place in an acrobatic display of flips, not unlike Olympic figure skating performances. However, Zhang’s incredible command of the vehicle is on full display, the cinematic equivalent of a quad axel, a selchow, and a super-fast spin with one leg pinned behind the head.