*Dearest* is quite different from Li Youzhi’s previous works. In this film, he did not rely on excessive melodrama.
From the very beginning—the moment Pengpeng is abducted—the tone of the movie is set; the fates of all the characters in the film can be described as tragic. It would have been easy to use this subject matter to manipulate the audience into floods of tears, but Li Youzhi chose not to. Instead, during filming and editing, he deliberately held back the tragic elements, opting for a calm, restrained perspective to showcase the fate of each character.
Li Youzhi’s intention was to ensure that throughout the viewing experience, the audience’s emotions were never fully released, kept instead in a state of suppressed tension. He wanted to use this bottled-up emotion to trigger their grief and indignation, spark their confusion, and force them to think. Why do it this way? Because for the first hour and forty minutes of this two-hour film, the experience is merely a decent meal. The true essence—the vinegar to complete the dish—is the fifteen-minute montage of missing persons advertisements at the end. In the theater, watching those slow-scrolling, seemingly endless ads, seeing the shattered families left in the wake of abduction, and watching the heartbreaking characters on screen merge into the reality of the real-life parents seeking their lost children... the emotion the audience had been suppressing finally, completely, exploded.
Chapter 320