The Theory of Original Family or Crime (2024)

Never knowing who and what to trust

Let Wind Goes By is a finely crafted crime drama with some of the best acting I've ever seen. It's a sad story of 3 childhood friends whose lives and dreams get shattered by unfortunate events, poverty and sheer bad luck. Sometimes it feels like these desolate dramas where the setting and environment play a big role were made just for me. The setting in this is a mining town that is about to be closed down and the inhabitants moved elsewhere. The cinematography is beautiful. There story revolves around two different crimes 10 years apart. These two timelines are well woven together, with more focus on the present (2003) than the past (1994).

The 3 friends are so fully fleshed out as persons whose lives and circumstances get out of their own control that we don't get to judge them as either good or bad people. We try to understand them, watch them, and study them, with sympathy. If anyone looks for shiny happy people this definitely ain't the place. The 2 policemen in charge who are also main characters, are just very ordinary humans with their own strenghts and weaknesses. They have no superpowers but just bite into solving the cases and never let go. It's shown how their persistence and passion also takes its own toll on them.

About the actors, Jiang Qi Ming as Liu Bai, Yang Cai Yu as Mei Wei, and Huang Feng Feng as Lei Chugui, are all simply amazing. Such nuanced characters, fully fleshed out. What makes this drama so good is that we really never know what and who to trust in the story. Whether they had a plan or worked things out together or just deceived each other, whilst still remaining each other's closest friends, is what makes up the suspense in Let Wind Goes By. It seems like a small thing but if you're into character based dramas, this one is just fascinating. Very little action or violence shown, which I liked. Even the one near-psycho character, Lei Changtian, admits his own dumbness and impulsiveness. Just when you thought this character was going to be a psycho killer caricature, he sits down and admits he's a typical guy who does jailtime bc of lack of self-control and obsessive compulsive drives.

That the veteran detective starts studying criminal psychology is one message for us watchers from the writer about how much thought went into building the story and characters. And how much they expect us to think, by ourselves.

The downside is that the pacing is slow. I recommend watching at 1.25 speed. And there were some things that were confusing or revealed too late, in the last episode, like what happened with the people in the burned car and who crashed the truck into the guy with a burned face. These things make me rate this 8.0.

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