Lunar New Year 2026: Scare Out

I was going to stagger these a bit, but Thursday showtimes are very weird this week, so it looks like I'm doing this on Wednesday and then crossing my fingers that nothing messes with getting to the last screening of By Design on Thursday, before getting back into the Lunar New Year material as Hong Kong comedy Night King, Korean drama The King's Warden open Friday. It looks like the Vietnamese family film that was going to open isn't anymore, and Pegasus 3 will play Assembly Row in Imax on Monday & Tuesday and then open on regular screens at Causeway Street next Friday. Still no word on Panda Plan 2 being inflicted on Boston, for better or worse.

Anyway, this one's a lot of fun, although the sudden realization that I recognize the source material toward the end kind of threw me and, well, spoilers down below!


Jing zhe wu sheng (Scare Out)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2026 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it when available and aw dang, the movie it reminded me of is a cheap 4K at Amazon!

Me toward the start of Scare Out: "Man, Zhang Yimou making a modern high-tech thriller is weird!" Me toward the end of Scare Out: Wait, is this a remake of AMERICAN MOVIE X? A Mainland Chinese movie can't end like AMERICAN MOVIE X! To be honest, I kind of wonder if that revelation is leading me to be a bit harder on the film than it really deserves; it was maybe a little than fine but now I was focused on what it couldn't do.

It opens with a State Security team tracking a foreign tourist about to receive stolen property, with Deputy Team Leaders Haung Kai (Zhu Yilong) and Yan Di (Jackson Yee Yangqianxi) co-ordinating on the ground and tech Chen Li (Lin Boyang) monitoring surveillance and controlling drones from the mobile headquarters. Things go sideways, and during the debrief, it's announced that rather than promote one of the two deputies to fill the empty Team Leader position, the agency is instead installing former colleague Hong Zhao (Song Jia), who reveals to the pair that the enemy may have a source inside the team, albeit in the early stages, more developing a source than controlling a mole. Huang Kai and Yan Di quickly realize that Hong Zhao is focusing her attention on them, and both may be compromised: Yan Di was contacted by ex-girlfriend FeiFei, who had been living abroad since they broke up, during the operation, and Huang Kai has been carrying on an affair with Bai Fan (Yang Mi), who has some video files of her own to hold over his head.

Scare Out is actually Zhang's third straight release set in the present (though the first was held up in the censor bureau long enough for him to shoot several of the historic dramas he's better known for), and it shares an LED-lit aesthetic with Under the Lights that's as intentional and well-designed as any of his costumed epics. The screen is filled with glowing arcs overlaid with digital annotations, as if all the information of a modern surveillance state combined with a canny quarry that knows every step that will be taken to catch them will inevitably send everybody in circles. As with that previous film, this may not be Zhang's traditional milieu, although he does occasionally do things that remind one of his roots, like a character in 2026 taking an arrow to the throat out of nowhere.

The trouble, perhaps, is that this is a slick thriller whose audience knows how slick thrillers work, and tips its hand early without enough characters to give screenwriter Chen Liang a whole lot of options for potential twists, until it gets to the one it can't entirely commit to. Zhang and company don't draw it out too far - it turns out that you can, apparently, still make a 105-minute thriller rather than bloat up past two hours if you try - although even in its tight time frame, you can see the story start to run in circles and work a bit too hard to link what really shouldn't happen this quickly up with what shouldn't take this long.

The vibe is good, though; it's got a cast full of actors who know the trick to speaking with crisp professional efficiency while not entirely coming off as robots, with a special shoutout to Yang Mi, whose Bai Fan is absolutely aware that she's the femme fatale in this situation and doesn't play coy. The moments of sudden violence tend to work even if they're not always entirely original (I suspect it's bad luck that one bit of action is awfully close to a gag in last month's The Fire Raven which was much more free to play it as potentially-fatal slapstick), and even when it's got to keep pushing past its logical endpoint to please the censors, the filmmakers manage to do so without feeling like they're undoing or reframing a bad situation as positive.

After watching the film, I looked up the one that I remembered and realized that I've actually seen three versions of the story. Gun to my head, Scare Out is probably the third-best of them, but it's a testament to the good skeleton created almost 80 years earlier that it updates pretty easily, and Zhang and company execute very well (as much as some have commented on how oddly conventional this recent run looks, the present does occasionally seem to see him reinvigorated and trying new things).

<SPOILERS!>

I don't want to leave folks hanging about which movie I was thinking of; so I'll just say that toward the end, I kind of sat up straight and said, wait, this is No Way Out, isn't it? After sleeping on it, I'm a bit less sure: It's been some time since I saw that movie, probably when it was playing on cable or UHF in the early 1990s, so I don't recall it very clearly beyond the last-minute revelation that Costner wasn't the murderer, but he was a spy. It probably followed the plot of The Big Clock pretty closely, which Scare Out doesn't, particularly; Yan Di doesn't really have anything to hide until the last-minute revelation that I saw coming and recognized. The hook for The Big Clock is "man innocent of murder nevertheless has a secret, reputation-damaging connection to the victim that would make him the prime suspect if revealed", and it's one of the great noir/pulp/thriller plots, universal enough that even things that aren't exactly remakes/adaptations contain a lot of its DNA. Scare Out is kind of adjacent to that - Huang Kai is not yet guilty but realizes that he's being developed as a source and is trying to figure out how to avoid his guilt being discovered, though it's not initially clear that he intends to frame Yan Di.

That said, the finale twist is absolutely right out of No Way Out, except that what that movie does - reveals that the sleuth had a lot more to lose than we thought and that his promotion in the wake of solving the crime would cause bigger problems - is just out of bounds in a Mainland movie; the security services have to be on top of it. So the shocking revelation's got to play out long enough to say, no, State Security is going to ultimately be on top of it, and while I think it handles that all right - Yan Di is notably miserable rather than vindicated as a result - it may still be working too hard after the story is essentially finished. Amusingly, that final scene lifts a lot from Infernal Affairs.

I do kind of think No Way Out is a pretty direct ancestor of Scare Out, even if the filmmakers wound up working backward from the finale rather than forward from the premise; the vibe is too close. Maybe not quite a remake, though.

Also, I really should watch No Way Out again, since I vaguely recall that the protagonist wound up being revealed as working for the Chinese rather than the more-typical Soviet Union, and it would be hilarious if China remade an American movie with Chinese-aligned villains into one with American-aligned guys.

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