AWFF25 REVIEW: 南京照相馆 [Dead to Rights] [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 137 minutes
Release Date: July 25th, 2025 (China) / August 15th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: China Film Group Corporation / Niu Vision Media
Director(s): Shen Ao
Writer(s): Shen Ao, Xu Luyang & Zhang Ke

If we don’t, we’ll end up like the people in them.

While Hitler hadn’t yet invaded Poland, a Japanese offensive into China had already begun. Set in December of 1937, Shen Ao’s Dead to Rights depicts one of the nation’s ports of entry and the massacre that ensued. More than simply show the carnage in Nanjing, however, Shen and his co-writers Xu Luyang and Zhang Ke push inwards to focus on a young Chinese postman whose compassion and fealty to the job stranded him behind enemy lines. That’s where Su Liuchang (Haoran Liu) unwittingly positions himself to ensure Japan pays for its atrocities.

The truth of what happened is made clear from the very start as Japanese promises to adhere to the Geneva Convention and treat surrendered Chinese soldiers well are quickly revealed to be lies. Those captured are bound and chained, kneeling in the streets when Japanese officers order their men to fire. And when their men refuse, those in authority remind them that the Chinese are animals and not to be thought of as human before aiming their own guns and shooting to prove it wasn’t a ploy. Civilians are inevitably next.

Su’s survival seems fated by how his bad luck in missing his chance to escape ultimately saves his life. So too does him holding a book of personal photos stamped by the studio that developed them. This insignia allows Ito Hideo (Daichi Harashima), a Japanese lieutenant (by rank only) and war photographer whose name reveals important familial ties that absolve him for never taking up his gun, to keep him alive due to needing someone to print the images he’s been snapping for the regiment. Su buys his safety by saying he can do it.

Add Chinese translator Wang Guanghai (Wang Chuanjun), a traitor leveraging Ito’s good will into earning passage papers for his wife and child, and we find three opportunistic men attempting to make themselves useful enough to not bear the brunt of the violence those surrounding them are only too happy to commit. Guanghai sees Su as a means to ingratiate himself further as a middleman. Ito needs Su to be his own personal Fotomat to ensure his shots get into the papers first. And Su needs them both to believe he’s invaluable.

Luckily, the studio’s actual proprietor is still hiding there when Su arrives. So, if Lao Jin (Wang Xiao) teaches and assists him in doing Ito’s bidding, they can all earn more time and protection to hopefully live long enough for the war to end or escape. It’s an intriguing wrinkle made more complex once Shen introduces two more figures in singer Lin Yuxiu (Gao Ye) and policeman Song Cunyi (Zhou You). Rather than convolute things, they actually work to diversify motives and remind us that acts of self-preservation often ensure collateral damage.

Dead to Rights exists in this moral gray. The filmmakers are constantly asking us to hope that decency might win out despite knowing it won’t. That Ito’s fear is actually pacificism and the others’ work isn’t traitorous because it’s not actively leading to their countrymen’s deaths. But Ito does condone the terror of rape, murder, and torture. His refusal to get his hands dirty doesn’t absolve him since that blood and dismemberment is what he photographs. And the others working for the enemy in any capacity eventually leads to some form of complicity.

What unfolds is therefore very difficult to watch because the barbarism committed by Japan was downright evil. This is the same rhetoric that Nazi Germany used to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust. It’s the same rhetoric Israel uses today to exterminate Palestinians. The notion that another human being is somehow inferior in a way that renders their life forfeit. The ease to throw someone to the wolves the moment they are no longer useful. The hideous impulse to think the only way to quiet a baby is to spike it into the ground.

How much of that horror can someone take? For those like Ito, the carnage might actually embolden them to join in. For those like Guanghai, it might break them to the point where they become numb to the consequences of saving their own skin. And for those like Su and his fellow fugitives, it radicalizes them to realize their own lives mean nothing compared to the bigger picture of what’s happening. Because the longer they develop Ito’s photos, the more they discover they have undeniable proof of Japan’s war crimes in their hands.

The script follows the usual plot progression of these types of focused war films with examples of self-sacrifice, betrayal, heroism, and tragedy. Shen and company do well to understand just how much rope Ito’s superiors would give him when it comes to allowing the enemy access to evidence that could lead to their own downfall and how their attempts to rectify the situation can lead to unforeseen heartbreak, righteous vengeance, and bittersweet victory for the Chinese. They give every character the choice to be noble. Some take it. Some don’t.

Shen pulls no punches in his direction, scale, or production design, throwing us in the middle of this massacre with a cast that perfectly captures the tortured reality of their fate via silent tears and haunted faces. This is how you memorialize the dead and hold their murderers accountable—by emphasizing how this brutality has a cost beyond statistics. It’s also how you open eyes to present-day examples of similar nightmares. The film digs into the power of propaganda and the necessity of bearing witness to expose truth at a time we need the reminder.