Review: Shadow (2018)

This stunning and stylish movie is visually spectacular! I may have less experience of poetic cinema, but with distinctive music, ‘Shadow’ becomes a poem whose words you may not know, but you just get absorbed in it. Once Walter Pater coined the phrase ‘art for the art’s sake,’ the same way some cinemas are only for the cinema’s sake. I will put this one here. At certain points, the movie gives my aesthetic pleasure. If I talk about cinematography, I am envious of all the people who have seen it in theatres! 

Two Kingdoms, Yan and Pei, had an agreement not to battle, and the conceited king of Pei also is not interested in taking his piece of the land back, which he lost in a war. But his General commander Ziyu sets up a duel between him and the general of Yan, which leads his demotion from the court. But then there is a secret (among so many). On the surface, we see that the person who presented as commander of Pei is actually a doppelganger Jing, precisely a ‘shadow’ of the actual commander who is gravely ill and has hidden in a chamber. But in deeper, Ziyu is a shadow of his shadow throughout the movie as he has depended upon him. The film becomes more intense when both love the same women, the wife of Ziyu. This duality of characters becomes more significant as the actor Deng Chao plays a dual role of both Jing and Ziyu. 

Lead women may have lesser space, but they make us feel their presence, especially Madam. The movie has an interesting take, the king Peiliang has so determined for peace that he agreed to send her sister the princess as a concubine for his rival’s son, on the other hand, the general commander Ziyu is no less determined to win the land back that he is not concern about the growing relationship between his lookalike and his wife (or he is purposefully ignoring it). The theme of duality we can see in the feminine war move in male soldiers and the masculinity of a warrior into a delicate princess and Madam.

The movie begins very slowly. Like very slowly. But when it gets to start with its actions, it just gets crazier (I mean the feminine moves with blade umbrellas? marvelous!).  “Shadow” visually depicting what the director wants to say. The literal and metaphorical use of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ has presented with more than 50 shades of grey, black, and white! They also represented as moral colors of the personality of characters of the movie.  Costumes, armours, especially umbrellas, add additional charisma to it.

In this movie, everyone is his or her own shadow. Nobody is entirely evil or perfectly virtuous, only share lighter or darker versions of grey. And in the end, if I want to highlight something above all, the movie is so subtle in its projection of almost everything that it seems neither overstated nor understated in style and that is what makes it appealing. A must watch underrated movie.