This movie was gorgeously shot, sad and brooding all throughout. The atmosphere was off the charts. The story didn’t do anything too ambitious, the narrative was overall predictable and I could guess exactly where most scenes were going. Jonathan was a very well-drawn character, but I felt Carrie and Shane were a touch underdeveloped, even in a movie that was nearly two hours long that really just focused on three characters. I was a bit hazy on the timeline of the film, too, but I won’t hold that against this movie too much since I am an American and have only a surface-level understanding of Mandarin.

I wish we could’ve gotten a bit more inside Shane’s motivations and feelings, especially for the very sudden action he takes at the climax of the film and the ambiguous ending at the beach. It didn’t sit great with me narratively, as I didn’t feel a throughline was drawn. Overall, there’s not much narratively this film does that hasn’t been done better before or since—but I did enjoy the cinematography and production design quite a bit.