Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

The Wild Goose Lake Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 19, 2020

The Wild Goose Lake may traffic in some tropes of film noir, at least in style if not entirely in content, but it just as frequently defies any easy categorization. There’s really not a noble man led astray in this story, since the focal character of the piece is an unrepentant scooter thief named Zhou Zenon (Hu Ge). There’s similarly no real femme fatale in terms of some seductive woman leading an otherwise honorable hero to his doom, and this is not solely due to the fact that, as just mentioned, Zhou is not an honorable hero to begin with. Interestingly, there are actually two women at play in this tale detailing Zhou on the run both from the cops and other gang members. One of the women is Zhou’s estranged wife Shujan Wang (Regina Wan, billed in the film as Wan Qian). The other is actually the first female character to be properly introduced, though it takes a while to discover her character’s context and background. Instead, early scenes offer a chain smoking, seemingly very worried type named Aiai Liu (Gwei Lun-Mei, billed as Lun-Mei Kwei), who walks up to Zhou in an underground section of a train station where a torrential rain is pouring outside for the seemingly random reason to get a light for her cigarette, but who turns out to have been sent to meet Zhou.

Structurally, the screenplay by Diao Yinan (who also directed) takes a couple of potentially disjunctive detours courtesy of two flashbacks, one for Zhou and one for Aiai. The first, belonging to Zhou, reveals what got him to the train station in a pretty badly battered state (Zhou's battered state is only exacerbated rather dramatically as the story develops). Zhou "works" as a motorbike thief, as the leader of one of an evidently loose confederation of gangs who actually have "training" meetings to discover new ways to do things like defeat alarm systems or quickly steal a bike's most valuable element, its battery. In one of these meetings, a turf war breaks out involving which gang can operate in which territory, and one of Zhou's underlings hot headedly shoots one of the other gang members. Zhou later confiscates his acolyte's weapon and offers to pay the victim's hospital bills, but instead the main mobster tells Zhou that the other gang has already agreed to a competition to see who can steal the most bikes in two hours. Whoever wins the competition will be granted the rights to the territory under dispute.

The competition seems to be going as planned until the brother of the shooting victim decides to exact revenge, which leads to some really graphic carnage. Zhou himself is shot in the maelstrom and riding through a torrential downpour (this film is filled with torrential downpours), bleeding and badly wounded, he sees a flashing light in the distance and, thinking it's the victim's brother again, fires his gun in panic. Unfortunately, it turns out he's seen a police car, and his shot kills a cop.

That background then returns the story to its "present" time, where it's disclosed that Aiai has come in the place of Shujan, and in fact it's Aiai's flashback which offers more detail about why Shujan isn't the one to come, and why in fact she was expected to begin with. Zhou seems to intuit his days are numbered, and with a huge reward on his head, he does reveal some honorable intentions by having put the word out to his (surviving) underlings that he wants to make sure Shujan gets the reward for turning him in. The upshot is that there's a rather labyrinthine network of people working at cross purposes to bring Zhou to justice, or at least make contact with him, seeing Shujan as the likely way to make a connection. While another mobster major domo named Hua Hua (Dao Qi, billed as Liang Qi), who is more or less a pimp who "manages" Aiai, is trying to get Shujan to Zhou for his own reasons, it turns out a cop named Liu (Fan Liao) has already gotten to Shujan for reasons of his own.

The plot, as twisty as it is, actually tends to take a back seat in this film to some of its presentational aspects, which are frequently quite arresting (no pun intended). There's a riveting sequence early on detailing the competing motorcycle thieves which includes some really bracing traveling and POV shots, and later scenes, including a seaside sequence that offers a bit of information on Aiai's life as a "bathing beauty" (i.e., a prostitute at a beach resort), are staged like something out of an Antonioni film, with a peripatetic camera wending its way through people arranged in various tableaux. There's also an almost surreal scene featuring a manhunt in a zoo in the middle of the night. The film is weirdly scenic a lot of the time, something that plays as a probably deliberate counterpoint to the desperation of many of the characters. And in fact the entire film is filled with people caught by circumstances beyond their control, with Yinan offering a clear socioeconomic subtext where the reward money has the potential to most definitely change destitute lives for the better.

The Wild Goose Lake Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Wild Goose Lake is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Film Movement with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.90:1. The IMDb lists RED Cameras and a 2K DI as the relevant technical elements, and the result is a really nicely sharp and well detailed presentation on this Blu-ray. As can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review, sequences in the film are sometimes drenched in sickly green-yellows or purples, and fine detail levels can understandably ebb and flow with some of these decisions, especially in some midrange framings. There are also significant portions of the film that play out at night, with little if any lighting around, and as such even general detail levels can vary. But despite some of these "built in" changes, the overall appearance here is often breathtakingly vivid, and in brightly lit outdoor scenes, as in some of the beach material, the palette pops extremely well and detail levels are excellent across the board. There is one kind of strange anomaly that looked a bit odd to me, with regard to the texture of the fabric of a kind of pink or purplish sweater Aiai wears (see screenshot 3). I'm not sure why, but there was a weird kind of shimmering or rippling effect I spotted a couple of times on this particular piece of clothing.

The Wild Goose Lake Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Wild Goose Lake features a nicely expansive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track in Mandarin. A couple of the set pieces, as in the competition between the motorcycle thief gangs, offer some great panning effects, and the relentless rain that accompanies several key sequences also offer good engagement of the side and rear channels for ambient environmental effects. A glut of outdoor material offers a wide range of realistic sounds from rustling breezes to the lap of water hitting the sand at a beach. Some of the most visceral sound effects are the sudden eruptions of gunfire that populate the first part of the film in particular. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout this problem free presentation.

The Wild Goose Lake Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Diao Yinan Featurette (1080p; 8:36) offers quite a bit of behind the scenes footage and some interstitial interviews.


• Hu Ge and Gwei Lun Mei Interview (1080p; 6:10) offers separate interviews with the two interspersed with scenes from the film (some with a timecode caption) and some more candid footage.


• The Goddess (1080p; 6:39) is a short directed by Renkai Tan.


• The Wild Goose Lake Trailer (1080p; 2:03)

Additionally, trailers for other offerings from Film Movement are included. As with most Film Movement releases, the disc also offers an About Film Movement option on the Main Menu which leads to text about and a trailer for Film Movement. The inside of the cover insert offers brief text about the film and an equally brief excerpt from an interview with Diao Yinan.

The Wild Goose Lake Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's a kind of interesting aspect to The Wild Goose Lake above and beyond its inherent qualities, a "little" data point which may cause some potential viewer eyebrows to raise: it's set in and around Wuhan, which is of course constantly in the news these days. This was obviously filmed before the outbreak of Covid-19, but the region seems to offer both bustling urban environments and some more rural, sylvan enclaves (the word "enclave" is actually used by a policeman at one point). The locale isn't really germane to the plot, but it gives this piece a little added kick, adding to a story that is probably bit too convoluted for its own good but which is presented with a fair amount of style and flourish. Technical merits are solid, and The Wild Goose Lake comes Recommended.