A search in a poor, remote village by a wealthy out-of-towner, a Beijing businessman, for the body of his son who’s died in a river-boat accident, turns by film’s end into bearing witness to a rural China that, while placid on the surface, is in fact roiled by powerful socioeconomic currents from afar. That breathtaking terrain-shifting, accomplished with the gentlest of touch by Wang, seeps through every aspect of „River’s Edge“.
