Black Coal, Thin Ice twists and turns as it goes: even the jolting electronic music over the end credits springs another surprise.

Maybe the angriest movie from mainland China since Li Yang's Blind Mountain.

What's fascinating is not merely the plot, but the wonderfully shot background, red and green neon on a grey townscape.

Behind that festival veneer lies a bland and deliberately opaque mystery thriller, whose neo-noir style exercise only serves as a far-fetched pretext for Diao to express the supposed unease of Chinese industrial desolation. [Full review in Spanish]