Near the start of “Only the River Flows,” police officers set up an office in a closing movie theater. That backdrop suits this Chinese noir, the third feature from the director Wei Shujun, which, at times, feels like it unfolds in a universe of other films.

Tangled, unresolved procedurals like Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac” loom large. Much of the score, on the other hand, is taken, strangely, from David Cronenberg’s “Crash” — not a murder mystery, but perhaps a clue to the kind of mind-body disconnect and existential stakes that Wei’s film means to ponder.

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But “Only the River Flows,” based on a work by the author Yu Hua, is not the pure pulp a summary suggests. (An opening quotation from Albert Camus is fair warning.) As Ma Zhe’s personal life and the investigation begin to merge in his mind, Wei’s film increasingly blurs the line between the real and the imagined. The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.

Trailer

IMDb