Our take
Director Zhang Yimou, who already has remarkable wuxia films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers under his belt, delivers another exceptional epic. Set during China’s Three Kingdoms era (220–280 AD), Shadow revolves around a great king and his people, who are expelled from their homeland but will aspire to reclaim it. The story requires a fair amount of patience at first, as it slowly builds a world consisting of various characters with different motives, before the real action begins. The journey through Shadow is visually pleasing thanks to its stunning cinematography, impressively choreographed combat, and overall brilliant production design. Packed with sequences that will take your breath away, it is an inventive martial arts epic with one amazing scene after another.
What it won
Cannes
1 nom
BAFTA
1 nom
The story
In a kingdom ruled by a young and unpredictable king, the military commander has a secret weapon: a shadow, a look-alike who can fool both his enemies and the King himself. Now he must use this weapon in an intricate plan that will lead his people to victory in a war that the King does not want.
Elsewhere
"It's filled with so many remarkable images, particularly in its middle section, that fans of palace intrigue and metaphorically ripe violence will find plenty to like."
— Matt Zoller Seitz
"Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou's breathtakingly beautiful "Shadow" is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time."
— Jessica Kiang
The details
Streaming arrival
Who picked it
Sonia Botsarova is a film and culture writer who explores the intersections between cinema and geography in her work on A Reel Trip and Medium. Her writing focuses on world cinema, with particular interest in the cinemas of Central Asia and underrepresented regions.
