Traces of Justice: China's Forensic History Gets a Slick, Propaganda-Laced Thriller Treatment

A portmanteau biopic tracing 50 years of Chinese forensic science through three gripping cases. Chen Sicheng delivers real craft alongside real ideology — the two are inseparable.

Chen Sicheng is best known for the Detective Chinatown franchise, a series that wraps crowd-pleasing genre energy in a glossy commercial package. Traces of Justice operates on a different register — more sober, more structurally ambitious, and more explicitly invested in institutional legitimacy. The film follows Cui Xun, a fictional composite of real forensic pioneer Cui Daozhi, across three decades and three cases: a child killing in the 1970s, a multiple murder in the 1980s, and a bus bombing in the 1990s. The anthology structure is the film's first smart choice — it lets Chen track the evolution of forensic science as a living discipline, where each case introduces techniques that become routine background detail in the next. Zhang Yi plays Cui across all three eras, ageing up with notable restraint. What the performance captures is professional absorption: this is a man whose inner life has been almost entirely colonised by the job. Personal relationships blur at the edges; the fingernails stay in focus. It's a type of performance that could read as thin, but Zhang makes the narrowness feel like characterisation rather than omission. The 1970s segment, in which improvised potato-based dental casting gives way to researchers biting each other's cheeks to generate comparison samples, is both genuinely funny and unexpectedly touching — scientists literally scarred by their dedication. Chen's storytelling is at its most confident in the forensic puzzle sequences. He follows the science procedurally, without dumbing it down or mystifying it, and the period texture is carefully maintained across all three settings. By the third segment, with Cui running a large, well-resourced team, the aesthetic shift is deliberate and effective: we have arrived, unmistakably, at something that rhymes with prestige Western procedurals — the same cool institutional competence, the same faith in method over intuition. The bus-bombing case brings the film's most unsettling material. The perpetrators are explicitly compared to Leopold and Loeb — a rare gesture toward international cultural referencing that briefly opens the film to something darker and more psychologically complex than state mythology usually permits. It doesn't last. The film snaps back to its reassuring structural arc: persistence wins, science prevails, justice lands. And this is where any honest account has to name the thing. Traces of Justice is sincere propaganda for the Chinese law-enforcement apparatus — not incidentally, but structurally. The end titles explicitly connect Cui's work to China's current mass-surveillance architecture. Chen doesn't obscure this; he frames it as the natural endpoint of fifty years of scientific progress. Whether you read that as unsettling, banal, or simply true about how most national cinema functions, it shapes what the film is doing and why. The craft is real. The agenda is real. They are not in conflict — they are collaborating.