YNOT at the Movies

Chinese director Shen Ao's (申奥) new film "Dead to Rights" (南京照相馆 | China 2025 | in Chinese/Japanese | 137 min.) is a haunting reminder of a history that must never be forgotten. The film confronts the brutality of the Japanese Imperial Army during the Nanjing Massacre with unflinching honesty, yet also recognizes the limits of what cinema can bear. As gruesome as it already is, the reality of mass rape and killing in Nanjing was far beyond imagination, and the filmmakers wisely balance the demand for truth with what audiences can endure in the theater. The result is a work that is both devastating and necessary—an act of remembrance as much as storytelling.

At the center of the film is A Chang (Liu Haoran), a postal worker who survives by pretending to be a photo technician. Forced to develop photographs for Japanese officer and photographer Ito (Daichi Harashima), he uncovers images that reveal, in stark detail, the atrocities committed against the Chinese people. The shop's owner, Jin Chengzong (Wang Xiao), hides with his family in the basement, clinging to the hope of escape. Wang Guanghai (Wang Chuan-jun), a translator who collaborates with the Japanese in the hope of protecting his wife and son, uses A Chang to secure the escape of his mistress, actress Lin Yuxiu (Gao Ye). Through A Chang's work, he is able to provide food for the survival of Jin's family and a wounded soldier, Song Cunyi (Zhou You), saved by Lin Yuxiu.

Liu Haoran gives A Chang a quiet resilience, capturing the fear and moral burden of a man trapped between survival and witness. Gao Ye plays Lin Yuxiu with dignity that survives even under crushing vulnerability, while Wang Xiao portrays Jin Chengzong with quiet strength as a father desperate to protect those hiding with him. Zhou You embodies the defiance of Song Cunyi, a reminder that not all resistance was silenced. The ensemble makes the story not just about the victims of war, but about individuals grasping at survival—and ultimately pushing back, finding ways to resist, to fight, and to hold on to a shred of dignity in the face of annihilation.

Wang Chuan-jun brings painful complexity to the translator Wang Guanghai, a weak and self-serving opportunist who convinces himself that betrayal is a form of saving others. He clings to power at the cost of dignity and loyalty, yet remains recognizably human—unable to face the slaughter of his compatriots, shutting his eyes and ears until the end, blind even to the fate of his own family.

Standing in chilling contrast is Daichi Harashima's Ito, a terrifyingly understated Japanese officer and photographer whose cultivated manners and artistic sensibility conceal a deep, insidious cruelty. His polite composure is more chilling than outright violence. Ito embodies a particular kind of evil—one that cloaks itself in refinement and aesthetics while enabling destruction.

If the script leans on the occasional contrivance—such as the near-unbelievable coincidence of Song Cunyi finding his brother's photograph in a darkroom—it doesn't diminish the film's weight. What matters is its refusal to let history fade into abstraction. The film insists that the crimes of the Nanjing Massacre be remembered not as statistics, but as human suffering, captured frame by frame, life by life.

And this is why the film demands to be seen. It is not an easy experience, but it is a necessary one. Sitting through "Dead to Rights" means bearing witness to pain that was real, to crimes that scarred generations, to lives cut short but not erased. The Nanjing Massacre cannot be undone, but it can and must be remembered. This film helps keep that memory stays alive, and in watching it, audiences become part of that act of remembrance.

"Dead to Rights" opens in theaters on Friday, August 15, 2025.