InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 11

FILM REVIEWS
THE DIABETIC
Vasilis Katsoupis
“The narrative Wen is weaving is a familiar and fairly shallow one involving a hazily-remembered night, a bag of money, and some
gangsters out to collect, and, in individual scenes, Wen hits the right notes competently if unexceptionally. Trouble is, he’s chosen to
tell this story with fractured chronology and a sad-sack voice-over delivered by Xue Ming from prison. It adds about as much as the
constant refrain of the title song, which is to say almost nothing save for applying an artsy sheen to the labored endeavor. At first, the
nonlinear approach seems poised to lend the film the fractal quality of memory, as if the lead recalling the events would naturally
remember the story out of order, but as the thriller plot begins to kick in, the technique is largely used only to superficially complicate
the action and show off the simplistic web being constructed.” — CHRIS MELLO
DIRECTOR: Mitchell Stafiej; CAST: James Watts, Travis Cannon, Oscar Aguirre; DISTRIBUTOR: TUBI; STREAMING: March 10;
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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