Directed by Neysan Sobhani
Written by Neysan Sobhani, Anders R. Fransson, and Daniel Wang
Starring Sun Jia, Harry Song, and Francesco Chen
Unrated
Runtime: 93 minutes
Available digitally June 17

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

As a fan of genre media, I’m always intrigued by the different ways genre can be leveraged to tell a story. For lower-budget features horror is usually the easiest sell (not that I’m complaining), so it was interesting to see Neysan Sobhani’s first feature, Guidance (aka 指引), opt instead for science fiction. It’s a risky move that mostly pays off for Sobhani, thanks in large part to judicious use of graphical effects and a screenplay that (believably) keeps the action limited to a few key locations.

Guidance is, at its core, a romantic drama about a love triangle between Han Miao (Sun Jia), her partner Mai Zi Xuan (Harry Song), and childhood friend and former lover Su Jie (Francesco Chen). It is set in the near future after a great war has left society fractured and paranoid, not to mention the physical aftereffects of radiation poisoning in large swaths of survivors. Against this backdrop, Su Jie, a tech entrepreneur, releases a nanotechnology platform called NIS that integrates with its user’s physiology. The only app usable with the NIS system (at least at launch) is the titular Guidance, which uses physical cues to tell if another Guidance user is being truthful.

The film follows two parallel stories: the “present” story of Han Miao and Zi Xuan using Guidance in an attempt to heal their relationship while on vacation in the countryside, and a “past” story centering around Han Miao sleeping with Su Jie while trapped in a safe room three months earlier. Looking back on it now, that all feels like a lot of ground to cover in a film that’s barely over 90 minutes long, but I thought Sobhani did an excellent job laying the groundwork and what exposition there is never felt too burdensome.

The visual elements of the film did a lot of the heavy lifting. And, let me be clear, Guidance looks very good. It’s no surprise that its Cinematographer (and co-producer) and frequent Sobhani collaborator, Saba Mazloum, was one of the more experienced members of the crew. It’s beautifully shot, and Mazloum does an excellent job keeping the transitions between aspect ratios (4:3 for “present” scenes, 2.39 for “past”) from feeling jarring. The visual effects fit into the film’s aesthetic wonderfully and, as I mentioned, it really felt like the film was written with a strong understanding of where and how those effects could have the most impact.

I was also impressed with the cast, especially the central pair of Sun Jia and Harry Song, neither of whom have an extensive list of credits. A film like Guidance, that rests so much on the interplay between its two principal characters, could easily fall apart if the actors aren’t up for the challenge.

Despite all of these positives, the plotting of the film is a pretty glaring issue. For example, I do not understand why the choice was made to have Su Jie be involved in the film’s tech. I don’t see that it served any narrative purpose aside from (I felt) a halfhearted attempt to tie the NIS and Guidance app to Han Miao and Su Jie’s shared past. It’s also never made clear how the two remain connected in the world of the film. The safe room tryst happens after Han Miao attends an interview given by Su Jie ahead of NIS’s worldwide release, but if there was any indication why she was one of the three or four people there, I missed it.

I do want to give Sobhani and his co-writers credit for taking some big swings plot-wise towards the end of the film, attempting to recontextualize everything that the audience had been shown so far, even though I didn’t feel like they landed. They seemed like the kind of plot twists that could be expected in a psychological thriller and didn’t feel in keeping with the tone of the film up to that point. Still, it was an admirable attempt to do something more interesting with an otherwise light romantic drama.