Indeed, the lawyers’ pursuit of the truth offers riveting drama, in which the prosecuting and defense teams are seemingly being manipulated in a game plan unfolding out of their control. The film has barely hit the half-hour mark as this happens, so the seemingly bizarre scenario of such a sudden breakdown in procedure, trust and allegiances is nearly destined to be a smokescreen: As the proceedings are rewound to the beginning and retold from different characters’ points of view - first from Tong’s, then from Zhou’s, and finally from that of the mastermind of the whole cover-up - the courtroom drama on show at first is dismantled, as the strange developments that shaped those initial exchanges gradually get embellished and explained, while the individual characters are seen putting behind-the-scenes machinations into place. The film’s first quarter is exactly as advertised on the can: It offers the proceedings as seen very much from above board, as state prosecutor Tong Tao ( Aaron Kwok, Cold War) cruises to a seemingly easy conviction until defense counsel Zhou Li ( Yu Nan, The Expendables 2 and Tuya’s Marriage) throws the case wide open as she manages to provoke Tong’s star witness, Lin Tai’s longtime subordinate Sun Wei ( Zhao Lixin) into admitting he murdered the woman as an act of revenge against what he describes as Lin’s long-running affair with his wife. She is charged with murdering the starlet girlfriend of her father Lin Tai ( Sun Honglei, Drug War), a tycoon with the checkered legal record of having been hit with multiple charges of fraud over the years. The case has attracted much public attention because of the young woman’s background and the nature of the crime she is accused of. The film’s English title - as per its more obvious Chinese counterpart, which literally translates to “Observed by the Entire Public” - refers to how the trial of Lin Mengmeng ( Deng Jiajia) is to take place: The proceedings - which revolve around the university student’s trial for murder - are to be broadcast live online and through Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter. While being entertained by all the intriguing twists and turns, domestic Chinese audiences will probably be let down by how Fei - who also wrote the screenplay - allows everyone to eventually emerge with their honor intact, when real-life events actually laid bare legal proceedings in which the accused, the witnesses and even the state itself are treading in pretty murky moral waters. While Silent Witness should be credited for making a step forward in trying to engage the mainland Chinese film industry with genre cinema - in this case, the courtroom-bound crime thriller - its flaws also illustrate the challenges of tackling such productions under a censorship regime that frowns on narratives deviating into any sort of moral ambiguity.
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