It's worth mentioning that writer/journalist Wang Yichun penned the story about twenty years ago in memory of her father who had just passed away, drawing inspiration from her own personal experience as a teenager in the early 1990s in semi-rural Henan, China. The story was supposed to become a book but little by little the idea of making it into a film worked its way and after many years of fundraising, the author finally improvised as a director and made it.
It's the beginning of summer of 1991 in Henan, a summer that will trigger important changes and awakenings in the life of teenager Jing (Su Xiaotong). A string of grisly crimes has unsettled a sleepy rural town as the corpses of two raped young women are discovered in the surrounding countryside and everyone, including Jing, is torn between worry, horror and curiosity about this event. As the authority soon proves ineffective and pathetic, and not a single step forward is made in the investigation, the police chief is forced to offer a promotion to whoever will unmask the killer, undermining the investigations with the chimera of a career advancement. But the film slowly leaves the procedural story in the background and focuses on Jin who is discovering her sexuality, with all the curiosities and doubts that this process involves. Jing is tormented by her father who denies her any feminine display, even riding a bicycle. She is required to respect a very strict moral code, while everyone around her seems to ignore it, including the police force who parades corruption and ineptitude. While Jing's father suggests that every expression of femininity inspires and instigates violent behavior, everything else suggests that the whole community is strongly damaged, precisely by this repression of desire. The title (literal translation from Mandarin) is quite explicit in this sense.
This coming-of-age summer tale allows the author to highlight the hypocrisy that surrounds Jing, hypocrisy of a country that – like the young protagonist – at the beginning of the 90s was shedding its skin and rapidly giving way to capitalism. However, past and present seem to meet in Jing's tedium. In her eyes, bored and fed up with the constant moral reproaches, there is a glimmer of hope that the new generation of women will become aware of their sexuality and social role. In conclusion, “What's in the darkness”, despite the occasional sense of incompleteness, is a sincere, ironic, and mature work which distances itself from most mainstream Chinese films where the past in the rural provinces is often portrayed with romantic nostalgia.
