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China · 2018
2h 20m
Director Bi Gan
Starring Huang Jue, Tang Wei, Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong Chi
Genre Drama, Mystery
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Luo returns to Kaili, his hometown, for his father’s funeral, but as haunting memories of his long-lost love resurface, a search for the mysterious woman begins. A moody art house film with a noir set-up that culminates in a 60-minute long take presented in 3D.
The unexpected love child of Wong Kar-wai and Andrei Tarkovsky, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” transforms from a lush, slow-burn pastiche to an audacious filmmaking gamble while maintaining the pictorial sophistication of its earlier section. It’s both languorous and eye-popping at once.
The Film Stage by Giovanni Marchini Camia
Although Long Day’s Journey is a far more polished work than Kaili Blues, it also feels a lot more calculated, often sacrificing emotional impact for ostentation.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Though his symbolism sometimes errs on the side of obviousness, Bi shows an uncommon knack for recreating and exploring the space of a dream—its transforming identities and places, the unreality made more transportive by the 3D format’s underutilized potential for creating dramatic space, matched by the mutations of the camerawork from close-up to tracking shot to crane shot and back again.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
Bi’s film is ultimately akin to the early image we see of Wildcat’s body being wheeled on a mine cart and pushed gently into the abyss, taking us on a slow and steady rollercoaster ride through memory, melancholy and movie magic.
While Long Day’s plot seems an afterthought, the experience is all that matters: the audience gathers all the clues, rummage through them to soak up the atmosphere and enter a world unlike any seen before. Make no mistake about it, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a flat-out masterpiece.
Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang
A sense of disorientation is a wholly appropriate response to a movie in which the past is both irretrievable and unshakable. But even at its most openly baffling, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” never loses its seductive pull.
Those who have the patience to go with its ravishing flow will find ample rewards, as Long Day’s Journey is a beautiful, smoulderingly romantic film.
Plunging viewers into an extended dream sequence in the name of abstract motifs such as memory, time, and space, the film is a lush plotless mood-piece swimming in artsy references and ostentatious technical exercises, with a star (Tang Wei, “Lust, Caution”) as decoration.
Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane
Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.
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