An Unfinished Film

A movies lingers in production hell as the world falls apart, in Lou Ye’s docu-fiction drama.

“You say ‘I have to do it. I have to do it’. Why? Tell me exactly what’s on your mind.”

We all have unfinished, unrealized projects in our lives. They linger as drafts on computers, unstable shelving in our garages, ideas in our heads and often we consider how good it would be if we revisited them all and finished them … and then we don’t. Things happen. Ideas remain uncompleted. It’s the natural lifespan of many creative endeavours – but occasionally one pierces through and is able to cement itself within you, and roars back to life.

I bring this up because that’s exactly how An Unfinished Film begins. Film director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui playing more or less himself) revisits an old film he never got to finish, inviting the cast and crew to return to finish it, a decade later. His lead actor Jiang (Qin Hao) agrees, and they begin shooting near Wuhan – in late 2019. When Wuhan goes into an immediate lockdown following the release of the Covid virus, Jiang and several crew members find themselves in a sudden lockdown in their hotel.

An Unfinished Film is a story that will appeal to a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. There are those who will connect with the isolation felt during the lockdown; others who would remember the uncertainty and seeming endlessness of it all; and others who really feel the frustration of having their lives come to a screeching halt. It keeps things real by expertly blending real life documentary shoots and people with actors playing parts. It’s only during the scenes of Jiang  in the hotel that it becomes evident what is what. Lou Ye knows exactly what he’s doing with the camera and manages to consistently fool the audience into believing everything that happened, well, actually happened. Obviously, anyone who knows Hao Qin or any of the other actual actors – or anyone who has seen the film supposedly being used as the titular unfinished movie –  will have their disbelief suspended more than others, but it still works quite well.

Ye uses behind-the-scenes clips from his previous films, notably Spring Fever which serves as much of Xiaoriu’s ever-unfinished opus, and while it might be a curious choice, especially for people who have seen those films, it also gives the premise a lot of credibility. Seeing Hao Qin a decade younger feels a lot more real than some other actor, or unconvincing makeup. All of this touches help cement An Unfinished Film’s credibility, resulting in a film very stressful, and a very real experience that will no doubt trigger some flashbacks to those who might have been quarantined in less than ideal circumstances.

I don’t often discuss editing in these reviews, as so many films do the bare minimum and keep things flowing well enough to not be worth much of a mention – but An Unfinished Film does a lot of interesting stuff. Not only does it combine clips from previous films, but there’s a lot of fun phone screen recording at play, and tweaks to the audio to really sell the perpetually online world in which we had to live for those months. While it might not be the most truthful documentary on the subject of Covid – on account of how it isn’t a documentary at all really – it’s one of the most honest I’ve seen, and if that isn’t the point of cinema, then I don’t know what is.

Verdict: Unique, hyper-meta and deeply real An Unfinished Film is the most accurate film about the pandemic I’ve seen to date, and likely will for a while.

Overall entertainment: 8.5/10
Violence: 1/10
Sex: 1/10
Covid cures: Pray it away, of course
Phones buzzing: Non-flipping-stop throughout
Second worst noise: That guy singing Baby Shark

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An Unfinished Film (2024)
Also known as: 一部未完成的电影
Mandarin

Director: Lou Ye
Writers: Lou Ye. Yingli Ma

CAST

Qin Hao – Jiang Cheng
Mao Xiaorui – Xiaorui
Qi Xi – Sang Qi
Huang Xuan – Ye Xiao
Liang Ming – Ah-Jian
Zhang Songwen – Tang