Scare Out

Zhang Yimou's "Scare Out" is a masterwork of nationalist cinema, which is to say it is a film designed to make viewers feel appropriately deferential toward the institutions that protect them. Produced under the explicit guidance of China's Ministry of State Security, it functions as a recruitment brochure disguised as a thriller. The plot concerns a leak of classified information, leading to a paranoid investigation within a security unit, and the film treats this premise with the gravity one might reserve for a treatise on constitutional governance. Characters suspect one another. Loyalties are questioned. The state apparatus proves resilient. We are meant to find this reassuring.

The cast is a respectable ensemble of contemporary Chinese actors, predominantly male and uniformly committed to the proposition that institutional authority is fundamentally trustworthy once internal traitors are eliminated. Song Jia and Yang Mi provide female representation in a supporting capacity, though their presence serves the narrative rather than interrogating gender dynamics within security hierarchies. The film contains no LGBTQ+ themes, no climate consciousness, no body positivity, no disability representation. It is austere in its ideological purity. There is no suggestion that capitalism requires critique, that the state surveillance apparatus might warrant skepticism, or that marginalized communities face systemic barriers. The only consciousness on display is nationalistic consciousness, which is to say the consciousness of power congratulating itself.

The film's modest box office performance (second place during the Spring Festival with 864 million yuan) suggests audiences may have found it antiseptic. Critics noted the absence of Yimou's usual sensuous visual language, replaced instead with the sterile competence of a procedural. One might argue that this is precisely the point: the film's aesthetic reflects its ideological content. It is all apparatus and no poetry. It celebrates the machinery of state authority with the deadpan sincerity of an instruction manual. We must respect the commitment to the craft of propaganda, even as we recognize it for what it is.