The Burns of Sin (只能活一个)

✨ Title: The Burns of Sin

ℹ️ Alternative Title: 只能活一个, Only One Can Live

🌎 Country of Origin: China (Mainland)

🍿 Format: Movie (🎞️)

📕 Series: Standalone

🕵️ Detective(s): Su Cheng

🗓️ Aired: July 6, 2018

🌐 Original Language: Chinese

#️⃣️ Number of Seasons: N/A

⏳Length️: 1 hr & 28 min

🔥Rating: Not Rated

⚔️ Violent Content: Mild

🫣 Foul Language: Mild

💋 Sexual Content: Mild

💯 Overall Assessment: Adult Audience

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Su Cheng returns to his hometown after several years abroad to find his best friend Wang and old crush Lin Jing married and settled down. Cheng’s memories of the city reflect a difficult childhood suffering from depression and frequent fights with classmates.

Suddenly Wang is found brutally murdered in what police suspect to be one of a series of serial killings over cheating spouses. The killer kidnaps the cheating couple and tortures them before murdering one and leaving the other as a witness. Jing refuses to believe her husband would have cheated on her and desperately searches for answers to his death. At her side, Su Cheng seeks to protect Lin Jing while keeping his own dark secrets at bay.

Meanwhile police suspect Su Cheng may have had something to do with the crimes. Is his return really as coincidental as it seems?

This film is part psychological thriller, part criminal investigation. It jumps back and forth between character perspectives, centering on no single character. Su Cheng receives the majority of screen time, but often through others’ perspectives of him. There is some confusion in that it leaps back and forth between the present and past in Su Cheng’s perspective, but that seems to be part of his psychosis to some extent. His trauma stems substantially from his childhood and past interactions with Wang and Lin Jing so their presence in his life now naturally triggers flashbacks.

There is a constant sense of the unreliable narrator in all perspectives, largely driven by everyone’s mistrust of each other combined with Su Cheng and Mo Chao’s psychological disorders and Lin Jing’s seemingly irrational faith in her husband. This unreliability drives the story as every detail you are given has to be reassessed in terms of the person introducing it. You sympathize with the police’s frustration in the investigation as they are constantly given only part of the information by witnesses.