The Soul Investigator

At last: an émigré Chinese movie which goes beyond the templates Wayne Wang designed all those years ago in Chan Is Missing and Dim Sum. Kal Ng's dark psychodrama, shot mostly in steely, psychedelic shades of grey but with spasms of luscious colour, sends a downcast man on a spiritual quest to discover why he has a perpetually bleeding wound which no one else can see. Guidance comes from the title character Chide the Wind (played by Ng himself), who tells him three anti-Confucian parables designed to help him out of his personal prison. Wonderfully idiosyncratic, it plays rather like Doctor Strange stories directed by Bresson.