AN UNFINISHED FILM - Mark Reviews Movies

An Unfinished Film, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 13, 2025

Up to a point, director Lou Ye almost convinces us that his An Unfinished Film is a legitimate documentary. Those with more knowledge of the Chinese movie industry might catch on faster, since most of the main actors in the movie are playing characters with different names and only based on them, but the approach Lou takes to show us a film production that suddenly comes to a halt because of a mounting crisis is quite effective.

The first sequence here sets up that premise. We meet movie director Xiaorui, played by real-life filmmaker Mao Xiaorui, who is, however, portraying a fictionalized version of Lou. He finds an old computer in his production office, sets it up, and discovers about more than half of a movie that he started shooting a decade prior. From what we learn, the younger Xiaorui was quite the stubborn artist, insisting that everything be done his way, and that led to the small movie's funding to cease before it could be completed.

Watching the footage and realizing it's all in good condition, he has a spontaneous idea. Xiaorui could finish that movie now, since the rest of the story only requires a few locations, a limited crew, and several actors. This means calling up Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), the star of the unfinished project, and hoping that he hasn't become too famous and busy to deal with a director who possibly let him down a decade ago.

Cheng agrees, albeit with some hesitation. His wife Sang Qi (Qi Xi) is eight months pregnant, expecting the couple's first child, and he had planned to spend the upcoming New Year's holiday with her and his newborn. Xiaorui sells him on the idea, though, because they both still believe the movie could be good and it shouldn't take too long.

All of this prologue, by the way, is set near the end of 2019. We know what this means for the crew and cast of Xiaorui's revitalized production, because it's recent history that still seems fresh and changed the world in so many ways, but they don't. In terms of dramatic irony, this is rather suspenseful stuff.

Most of the story, then, is set in a hotel, where Xiaorui and his crew are preparing to shoot some final footage before everyone returns home to celebrate the new year. People talk about what's happening in Wuhan, as rumors are swirling about an infectious and deadly disease, but that's far away from here. As the cast gets dressed and in makeup and while the crew starts setting up equipment, Xiaorui learns that the management has asked that a hairdresser among the crew be ejected from the hotel. He's from Wuhan.

From that point, the movie proceeds at a lightning pace. Confusion erupts, first among the crew, as some people get a bad feeling about what's to happen and start to pack their things early, and, soon enough, within the entire hotel. Using various "objective" cameras that follow the production like a behind-the-scenes documentary and video calls from those in the movie production, Lou portrays how a few seem uncertain what to do and how those who are determined to leave the hotel, find a flight, and make it back home are met with dozens with a similar idea.

This is undeniably the strongest section of the movie and a potent reminder of that early chaos and confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here it is, perhaps, at ground level and close ground zero, as the police, who have heard about the man from Wuhan in the hotel, put the entire building on lockdown. Following Cheng and Xiaorui, those cameras race through the hotel, down stairwells and to back alleys, as they try to take a van away from the place before the police can stop them.

Through it all, Lou's technique remains consistent, as if we're watching, almost in real time, as that presumed documentary crew keeps filming—no matter how desperate the situation becomes and even in the face of persistent and abusive cops ordering them to stop. In retrospect, it's almost inevitable that Lou and Yingli Ma's screenplay loses its way after this extended, self-contained narrative of a sequence. It's so impressive on a technical level and harrowing as a reflection of reality that there's really nowhere else for this narrative to go.

It does keep going, however, bringing the cast and crew into the isolating and temporally ambiguous world of lockdowns during the pandemic. The documentary illusion that Lou has so thoroughly created until that point diminishes (Why is there an "objective" camera with Cheng through all of this, even though he and no one else, including the person operating that camera, acknowledges its existence?), and the story becomes one of stretches of boredom and repetition.

It's accurate, in other words, to the experience of sheltering in place during the pandemic, albeit with the authoritarian air of the policy in China, and Lou brings a slightly subversive bent to this tale, as the characters and real people from online footage look for freedom in any way they can. Because of that real footage, there's still a documentary element, then, to An Unfinished Film, but the narrative that's the focus of this movie quickly loses its way, its point, and its significance in the face of that inescapable reality.

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