3/26/2025
In mid-2019, director Xiaorui digs up the footage for a film he abandoned 10 years earlier. He and his crew make plans to resume shooting around Chinese New Year 2020. This is the real-life premise behind Lou Ye's An Unfinished Film.
(What follows includes spoilers about the sequence of events, pace of action, and details included in the film, but all of it is general knowledge about how the Covid pandemic unfolded.)
Fast forward to late January 2020. The crew — now playing themselves in a fictionalized reimagining of events — has holed up in a hotel. It's three days before Chinese New Year, and the production manager is scrambling to coordinate across departments before they break for the holiday. The pivotal action in An Unfinished Film takes place during this single day. In intimate handheld shots that follow crew members through the halls and rooms of the hotel, the film captures all the confusion, dismissiveness, wariness, uncertainty, and calculation of risk that marked the escalation of the Covid pandemic, careening toward the inevitable: By the end of the day, someone has fallen ill, and the entire hotel is placed on lockdown.
From here on, the film makes heavy use of video chats and TikTok-style clips. Quarantined in his hotel room, a crew member follows the development of the pandemic via videos on social media. He remains connected to his wife and newborn baby at home via video — they eat together; they fall asleep together. On New Year's Eve, the crew members trapped in their hotel rooms count down to midnight together, and a dance party ensues. Later, An Unfinished Film pulls away from the story of the film crew and becomes a more general historical document, cutting in videos and still images that were shared online in those early weeks of the shutdown.
It's hard for this not to sound clichéd, and yet: The "unfinished film" of the title is metaphorical on multiple levels. Most obvious is that the pandemic is not over. Even to those who misguidedly believe the spread of Covid is now medically insignificant, the disease and its effects continue to reshape human life and human lives in ways that we have yet to apprehend. The "unfinished film" is also every life lost to the pandemic, and every life trajectory irrevocably disrupted. Finally, the "unfinished film" is Lou Ye's movie, the one that was ultimately released, which could be considered a rough cut — just one framing of one group's circumstances by selections of the endless pool of footage that people around the world recorded and shared, just one way of narrating the incommensurable story of Covid.
What seized me most about the film is that it never zooms in too close on any one person's story. The individual is eschewed in favor of the collective, the public, the citizenry. Every act and occasion that marks An Unfinished Film as a pandemic story is depicted as a collective experience. One of the real-life TikTok-style videos that's included is, as the captions explain, by a person running out toward the empty streets of Wuhan on China's National Day of Mourning at the beginning of April 2020. In the distance, a chorus of vehicle horns blares in observance of the designated three minutes of silence for the dead. The person recording the video wails nonstop, the phone shaking in their hand. If I hadn't been in a movie theater, I would have wailed too. Not only for the dead, but for the loss of the modes of living in common that people found through living apart and discarded too easily when the world reopened.