《嫌疑人X的献身》最致命的bug。
There are no key spoilers for the film The Devotion of Suspect X below—only one tiny detail, so I don’t think it counts as giving anything away. Whether you’ve seen the film or not, please read on without worry.
Two reasons to get involved in a murder case
Let me start by asking everyone a question: under what circumstances do the police and detectives begin investigating a murder?
There are probably only two:
1.Knowing for certain that someone is dead;
2.Strongly suspecting that someone is dead.
If you know for certain that someone is dead, that means you’ve found a body. Of course you have to investigate that. Ninety-nine percent of detective novels begin their stories with the discovery of a body.
The second situation is when you strongly suspect that someone has died.
Then you start with a missing-person report, naturally. The police begin by investigating the disappearance, and the more they look, the less things add up. They start to suspect that the missing person was actually murdered. At that point, a missing-person investigation automatically turns into a murder investigation.
Two little things a murderer has to do
Since there are two conditions for the police to get involved, if a murderer wants the case to go undiscovered, there are really only two things to do:
1.Dispose of the body—without a body, there is no murder.
2. Don’t let anyone think this person has gone missing.
Getting rid of the body
The first thing depends on the murderer’s own initiative.
Dismember it and sink it in a river, dissolve it in sulfuric acid, bury it in some remote mountain wilderness—the methods are endless. There’s bound to be one that suits you.
Missing-person posters
The second thing depends largely on luck. It all comes down to whether the victim was a social butterfly while alive.
If a hundred people immediately report him missing and start looking for him, well, good luck to you.
What Shi Hong should have done
All right, here’s the question:
If you were Shi Hong in the Chinese film The Devotion of Suspect X, which premiered last week, how would you help Chen Jing and her daughter get off the hook?
If I were Shi Hong, this is what I’d do—
Shi Hong takes over:
Chen Jing, you killed someone? Don’t worry, I’ll help you handle it.
First, tell me everything about this person.
What? He’s your ex-husband?
Does he have any other relatives alive? Both parents dead? An only child? Excellent. No relatives will come looking for him.
Does he have a job? What? He’s just a small-time hoodlum? Even better, +2. No dependable coworkers will care that he’s gone missing.
Oh? He’s a gambler? He came this time to ask for money? Then he might have creditors.
But don’t worry. Even if the creditors have no shame, and eventually track him down here after realizing he’s missing, you can either pay them off and send them away or call the police openly. The police absolutely won’t suspect murder; they’ll actually sympathize with you and your daughter.
Hmm? I found a string of hotel keys in his pocket. The hotel owner could be a liability. If he notices that nobody has checked out for a long time, he might call the police.
But that’s easy: tomorrow I’ll pretend to be your ex-husband’s friend and check out for him.
There. Now no one in the world will care that your ex-husband has gone missing.
All that’s left is to dispose of the body.
You can relax about that too. I’ll dismember the body in a little while and throw it into the river.
I’ve studied every branch of math and science, so I fear no road under heaven. With my knowledge, this body-wrapping package will be sturdy and dependable, with no tricks and no fine print. I guarantee your ex-husband will sink to the bottom piece by piece and won’t float back up for five years.
And just like that, this murder case has been erased from the face of the earth.
Chen Jing:
You’ve done so much for us mother and daughter. I have no way to repay you.
Shi Hong:
You could offer yourself to me. Hahahaha.
Shi Hong and Chen Jing and her daughter lived happily together from then on.
You see, all Shi Hong really had to do was check out of the hotel and get rid of the body. Those two little things would have saved Chen Jing and her daughter.
Because judging from Chen Jing’s ex-husband as he’s portrayed in the film, no one would have cared that he was missing.
And judging from the film’s only scene of body disposal, Shi Hong must have dismembered the body, wrapped it layer by layer, and sunk it in the river. Given Shi Hong’s meticulousness, he should have been able to keep those pieces from floating up anytime soon. By the end of the film, the pieces had indeed not been found.
Shi Hong never needed to sacrifice himself
So, if the goal was to get Chen Jing and her daughter off the hook, Shi Hong’s later, utterly heartbreaking master plan was completely unnecessary.
This is the film’s most fatal bug. Although the film is called The Devotion of Suspect X, and the sacrifice is the part that moves the audience most, the truth is that Suspect X never needed to sacrifice himself.
A fatal bug
This isn’t Alec Su’s fault. The bug that “no one cares that the ex-husband has gone missing” already exists in Keigo Higashino’s original novel—and it stands out even more.
In fact, the novel goes so far as to have a police officer investigating the case explicitly emphasize that the ex-husband has no relatives.
In other words, the murdered ex-husband is basically no different from a vagrant on the side of the road. His disappearance would never have attracted anyone’s attention in the first place.
If that’s the case, doesn’t that later super-elaborate master plan amount to painting a lawn green and camouflaging a giant tree?
How to fix the bug
Now for the next question. If you were Alec Su, the director of The Devotion of Suspect X, how would you fix this bug?
It’s simple: give Chen Jing a former mother-in-law.
Even if he’s human garbage, in his mother’s eyes he’s still an innocent child. If her child disappeared, she’d be frantic.
As long as the police started looking into Chen Jing’s ex-husband’s whereabouts, even if they couldn’t find the body, there would be no guarantee that Chen Jing and her daughter could withstand the pressure of police questioning without turning themselves in.
That way, Shi Hong’s sacrifice would truly be indispensable.
So the film should begin from Police Officer Luo Miao’s point of view.
A worried middle-aged woman comes to report a case:
Officer, my son has been missing for several days. Please help me find him.
Luo Miao pats his chest and replies:
Serving the people and solving their problems is the sacred duty of the people’s police. Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll go find your son right now.
Then Luo Miao produces a small, exquisitely crafted car remote. Beep beep—and a self-parking BYD sedan swings through a perfect arc and glides to a halt beside Luo Miao’s feet with hair’s-breadth precision.
Luo Miao leaps into the BYD—one hundred times more dashing than Bruce Wayne, and one hundred times more badass than the Batmobile—and speeds off in a cloud of dust.
BYD really ought to pay me for advertising in this episode. But they didn’t.
Gossip mentioned in this article:
1. Bug
Many people think the biggest bug in The Devotion of Suspect X is that Chen Jing and her daughter were actually acting in self-defense when they killed the man, so there was no need to cover up the truth.
But when you connect that with the real news story from not long ago, this isn’t merely not a bug. It’s an astonishingly realistic setup under China’s current legal environment.
2. Another purpose of the sacrifice
The film and the original novel both mention that another purpose of Shi Hong’s sacrifice is to cut off his own way out.
But I think that simply helping the mother and daughter dismember and dispose of the body had already tied him to the crime. So this reason still isn’t sufficient as a motivation for the sacrifice.
3. Alec Su
Despite its fair share of flaws, the film is quite good overall. Chinese genre films are improving at lightning speed!
I’ve gone from indifferent to a fan of Alec Su. Little Tigers, Fifth Prince, major director—he’s practically life’s winner.
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