Alan Aruna, China, drama, Huang Yi, movies, Peng Yuchang, Phoebe Hu, reviews, Sam Quah, sci-fi, science fiction, The Fire Raven, Wang Xun, Xing Jiadong, Xu Jiao
January 31, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Sam Quah
Mandarin with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in 2025 (with flashbacks to 2010), in the fictional Doma City, China, the sci-fi/drama film “The Fire Raven” features a predominantly Asian cast of characters (with a few white people people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A police detective and her psychic brother have a volatile relationship, as they try to solve a series of murders, while there is citizen unrest over air/ventilation taxes.
Culture Audience: “The Fire Raven” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of murder mysteries with plot holes and unrealistic plot twists that insult viewers’ intelligence.
“The Fire Raven” could’ve been an intriguing murder mystery thriller, but this disappointing movie has too much choppy editing and too many increasingly ludicrous plot twists to be enjoyable. Most of the acting performances aren’t very good. This is the type of movie that tries to do so many things at the same time, in an effort to look clever, but it just ends up looking like a moronic mess.
Written and directed by Sam Quah, “The Fire Raven” takes place in the fictional Doma City, China. The main story happens in 2025, but there are pertinent flashbacks to 2010. “The Fire Raven” has a little bit of science fiction because there’s some technology depicted in the movie that didn’t exist in 2025. Doma City is also a subterranean city because of environmental issues.
“The Fire Raven” haphazardly jumps back and forth between character subplots in ways that can make the viewers feel like they’re experiencing cinematic whiplash. There’s barely time to absorb what’s shown in many scenes before the movie abruptly cuts to another scene. This hyper style of film editing becomes very annoying to watch.
The movie begins at a place called Pacific Factory, where disgruntled workers are participating in a protest to abolish an air/ventilation tax. It’s not really explained until much later in the film why there’s an air/ventilation tax in the first place. Meanwhile, a raven is seen flying through the air, which is a recurring image in the movie.
On September 6, 2025, a man in his 20s named Fang Tianyang (played by Peng Yuchang) wakes up in his bed after having a nightmare. Tianyang has psychic abilities. In his nightmare, he dreamed about a 43-year-old woman being followed to her apartment by someone dressed all in black and wearing a raven mask. The stalker then stabbed and beat the woman to death inside the apartment.
The woman is soon identified as Taralah (played by Huang Yi), a bachelerotte who lived alone. Tianyang immediately knows who Taralah is because 15 years ago, when he was about 6 or 7 years old, Tianyang was on a train and hiding in a compartment when he witnessed Taralah get her left pinky finger get cut off. The full circumstances of this dismemberment are eventually revealed as a major clue to who Taralah’s killer might be.
Meanwhile, Tianyang’s older sister Fang Zhengnan (played by Ning Chang) is a Doma City police detective who’s been assigned as the lead detective in this homicide. Tianyang and Zhengnan (who is about five to seven years older than Tianyang) were very close when they were children because they grew up as orphans. Zhengnan was very protective of Tianyang, who showed psychic abilities from an early age.
However, as adults, the relationship between Tianyang and Zhengnan has become strained. Tianyang frequently wants to help with Zhengnan’s investigations by telling her about his psychic visions. Zhengnan has some resentment toward Tianyang because she thinks he interferes in her work in ways that he shouldn’t.
And so, when Zhengnan has been assigned to investigate the murder case of Taralah, she gets very annoyed when she finds out that Tianyang went to the crime scene first to investigate on his own. Tianyang tells Zhengnan that he had a psychic vision that Taralah was killed by someone dressed entirely in black and wearing a raven’s mask. Tianyang also tells Zhengnan that he’s sure the motive for the murder was revenge.
Zhengnan doubts that this information is correct because Taralah lived a quiet life and appeared to have no enemies. However, Taralah’s shady boyfriend Shang Zhan (played by Alan Aruna) is involved in the criminal underworld, and the couple was seen arguing not long before Taralah died. Zhan becomes the prime suspect in Taralah’s murder, even though he insists that he did not murder her.
Other characters in the movie have important roles in how the story unfolds. Cai Min An (played by Huang Xiaoming) is a handsome and charismatic political activist. He is Zhengnan’s role model and her greatest inspiration to becoming a police officer. He is also involved in protests against the air/ventilation tax.
A former police officer named Lin Hongyan (played by Xing Jiadong) left the Doma City Police Department in disgrace and shows up later in the movie. Zhengnan has two younger police department colleagues who do mostly administrative and research work in helping her with the homicide investigation: mild-mannered Ruby (played by Xu Jiao) and nerdy Edward (played by Wang Xun), who are both eager to impress Zhengnan.
The serial killer disguised as a raven strikes again. As shown in the movie’s trailer, the killer begins murdering prominent and affluent members of Doma City society. It should come as no surprise that all of the killer’s murder victims have scandalous secrets. Meanwhile, Tianyang keeps having nightmarish visions of a teenage girl named Lin Xiao Di (played by Phoebe Hou) being murdered in 2010.
“The Fire Raven” zips around various scenes and plot points like a person with a very short attention span. Tianyang is depicted almost like an underestimated superhero. Not only does he have psychic abilities (even though skeptics doubt his psychic visions are credible), but he also has a prosthetic left leg that can only be described as “bionic.” You can bet that he uses this leg’s superpowers to his advantage when he gets into fights.
“The Fire Raven” sometimes has an off-balance tone when it tries to inject comedy into this gruesomely violent murder mystery. And many of the fight scenes are awkwardly staged. For example, there’s a big fight scene that takes place at a wrestling match, where Zhan is about to be arrested, and the entire venue turns into to chaos, where too many people in the audience fight like they’re mixed-martial artist pros. Nothing in this scene looks believable.
Aside from the movie’s tonal and editing imbalance, the bigger problems in “The Fire Raven” are the movie’s weak screenplay and erratic direction. The murder scenes are filmed in a very schlocky and tacky way, but other parts of the movie want to look artsy and elevated. The main characters have hollow personalities, while none of the acting in “The Fire Raven” is impressive and is often very over-the-top hammy.
“The Fire Raven” really takes a nosedive in the last 30 minutes of this 117-minute film, when idiotic plot twists are crammed into the story, to an almost embarrassing level. These plot twists just add to the plot holes that already litter “The Fire Raven” and bring up questions that the movie never answers. Simply put: Anyone who wants to watch an absorbing murder mystery with a great story and compelling characters should avoid watching “The Fire Raven.”
China Lion Film Distribution released “The Fire Raven” in select U.S. cinemas on January 16, 2026. The movie was released in China on December 31, 2025.