A Touch of Sin (2013)

These brutal slayings never feel either celebratory or cold, due largely to how Jiang expresses his character’s alienating directness and rage. The violence isn’t comical, necessarily, but there’s an exhilarating, measured embellishment to how the blood flows from Dahai’s victims, the bluntness and absurdity of the acts making them almost deadpan in nature.

— Chris Cabin (Slant Magazine)

Set against these characters and their turbulent personal and social struggles, Zhou sticks out like a sore thumb, but he’s the crux of the film, its very own Monsieur Verdoux among characters still able to rationalize their extreme reactions. [Xiaohui’s] self-loathing, Dahai’s perverted indignation, and Xiaoyu’s righteous self-defense all find their endpoint in Zhou, who clarifies the other stories not as laments for the system’s oppression of these individuals, but for the way individuals who strike back against a corrosive system are nonetheless inculcated in its worst attributes and can only respond in kind.

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The film teases the passivity [internet-mediated] interactions can foster when Xiaohui and Lianrong simply post “WTF” under each news item.

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A Touch of Sin’s most defining image is the one that closes out the first arc, that of a previously abused horse trotting free from the master Dahai murdered. As with the characters, the horse, no longer whipped, but still yoked to a cart, has lost its most immediate oppressor, but is nowhere near free.

— Jake Cole (Slant Magazine)

A Touch of Sin is remarkable in that Jia rather sardonically points out that, more often than not, his characters’ lives are improved (albeit briefly) by the violence they embrace. It’s a stunning commentary on why our collective belief in might makes right continues to prevail: Violence gets results in ways that more peaceful behavior doesn’t.

— Tim Grierson (Paste Magazine)

Two of the most powerful scenes in A Touch of Sin feature an anonymous crowd in a public space, with the main characters used as proxies to probe the state of this collective rootlessness: Zhou San’er walks through passengers who throng in front of the train station and Xiao Yu takes a rest amidst young workers waiting on call in the lounge of Yegui-ren Sauna in the wee hours. In both scenes, Jia uses music, slow motion, and contrasting rhythms to turn the most mundane and transient time and space into haunting lyrical tableaux of the “floating life” in contemporary China.

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If the homecoming of Zhou San’er provides a snapshot of China’s rural malaise and forecasts its bleak future as the country intensifies its urbanization.

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The ubiquitous maps hanging in the domestic space of [Vermeer's] work, like his forever half-open windows and doors, evoke an imaginary provenance beyond the paintings’ frames; maps were common in Vermeer’s home country and other European nations during the age of exploration. Jia’s cell phones and iPad serve a similar function in his film, and they belong to today’s era of global capitalism.

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Jia’s discreet placement of an apple throughout the film teases his public to speculate on its meaning. Almost everyone in this film is in proximity to an “apple.” Da Hai is ready to bite into an apple-like tomato; Zhou San’er peels an apple for his son; Xiao Yu inherits the fruit knife that her departing lover brought to peel apples on his trip but left behind at the train station; and of course, Xiao Hui works for an Apple supplier. The meaning is at once literal and symbolic: everyone partakes of the apple of sin. The allegorical meaning is tied to “Apple,” the prime brand and icon that represents the triumph of global capitalism. Having bitten into its own “apple” of capitalism, China is now experiencing euphoria as well as the painful spasms of its new twenty-first century.

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Jia uses elliptical images and icons of faith as visual signposts to map China’s dysfunctional belief system: a Madonna painting on the delivery truck that’s lost in the town center of Black Gold Mountain, the standing statue of Mao that hails from the socialist past around which the truck makes a U-turn, the two Catholic nuns who surreally stand by the road in the wake of Da Hai’s mass shooting, the mass-produced Buddha statues of all sizes that are imprisoned behind iron railings, unable to extend a helping hand to Xiao Yu and his Buddhist companion Lian Rong.

— Jiwei Xiao (Film Quarterly)

In some movies, ['hypertext'] connecting moments can be quasi-mystical and sentimental (we are the world) and tend to gut whatever political point hovers in the vicinity. Here, the characters are connected by their existential reality of being alive in contemporary China.

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Late in the movie, when a young man and woman slip some live goldfish into a stream, enacting a Buddhist ritual in which captive animals are released to encourage compassion. The animals of course need to be trapped so they can be freed, a dreadful paradox that these two imprisoned people will never experience.

— Manohla Dargis (The New York Times)