THE DAY THE SUN TURNED COLD Movie Review

Tianguo Niezi

Director Yim Ho's quietly jolting, Hong Kong noir is the story of a young man who goes to the police with his suspicion that his father's death a decade earlier wasn't an accident. The killer, he's convinced, is his own mother. Selective memory (seen in flashback) gradually becomes “repressed memory” in The Day the Sun Turned Cold, a taut little thriller that can be read on many levels and never loses sight of its crime-drama origins. The young man's near-pathological attachment to mom ultimately reaches critical mass when circumstantial evidence—real and remembered—can no longer be denied. Though the solution to the crime is presented without ambiguity, the age-old mystery of how we manage to see only those “truths” that we want to see remains as puzzling and disturbing as ever.

NEXT STOP … The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Rashomon, The Conversation

1994 99m/C HK Siqin Gowa, Tuo Zhong Hua, Wai Zhi, Ma Jingwu, Li Hu; D: Yim Ho; W: Yim Ho; C: Hou Yong; M: Yoshihide Otomo. VHS KIV