Lou Ye made an international splash with the elegant, beautifully shot and Vertigo-like Suzhou River back in 2000, but since then his daring style and frequent forays into sex and politics have led to censorship by the Chinese authorities. The rain-drenched, noirish Mystery marks his return to filmmaking after a five-year official ban. And what a return it is…

"Lou Ye has marked himself out as a filmmaker who is ready to put sex on screen in a way few or none of his fellow Chinese filmmakers are willing or able to do. This intriguing… noir-melodrama is another case in point: a sexually intense thriller set in the colossal city of Wuhan in eastern China, which the director portrays as an unimaginably gigantic forest of featureless skyscrapers, their summits lost in the smog. The film has touches of Chabrol—and even a weird hint of Fatal Attraction—and also offers a sly satirical perspective on modern China’s new rush to capitalist riches and bourgeois prosperity… [We are introduced] to the comfortable, placid domestic world of Yongzhao (Qin Hao), a businessman, married with a daughter, who is well on the way to wealth. Yongzhao’s story is complicated by the strange situation engulfing his wife Lu Jie, played by Hao Lei…Out of the blue, Lu Jie has been befriended by Sang Qi (Qi Xi), the mother of one of her daughter’s classmates; she seems weirdly intent on striking up an acquaintance. Sang Qi asks to meet Lu Jie for coffee one day and makes a startling confession. It is to be the beginning of a bizarre and unsettling duel between the two women…"—Peter Bradshaw, Guardian