Oozing atmosphere with its noirish neon glow, the film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father's funeral, Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat, and searches for lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who continues to haunt him. Sculpting time and space through virtuosic technical feats, Bi's film yields successive visual and aural delights. With talismanic cues and motifs of uncanny doubling, the film is bisected — its first half recast in the second through a vertiginous, trance-inducing, hour-long single take. A hushed, hypnotic study of hazy memory, lost time, and flight — and featuring the formidable Sylvia Chang as Wildcat's mother — 'Long Day's Journey into Night' leads the viewer on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage, one that both reveals and conceals a world of passion and intrigue.
