AFTERSHOCK
DVD region 2. Metrodome.

The promotional artwork and trailer for Aftershock suggest that this will be China's answer to the big Hollywood disaster film - a somewhat misleading suggestion, in fact. The actual film is far more interesting - a quiet, sometimes bleak drama that effectively tells a story of heartbreak and suffering with such power that during the first half, I wondered if I could stand to watch the whole film.

The film opens in 1976, with the Tangshan earthquake - a 23 second tremor that left quarter of a million people dead and many more homeless. The focus of the film's attention is one family - specifically Li Yuanni (Xu Fan), who first sees her husband crushed as he tries to rescue their twin children from there collapsing home, and then has to make an impossible choice - she's told that the children are both trapped under a concrete slab, and that by moving it to rescue one, the other will be crushed. She has to decide which child lives and which dies. Her decision and its consequences are then the focus of the film as it moves through three decades, until the earthquakes of 2008 draw the threads of the story together.

Aftershock is remarkable stuff. the earthquake scenes at the opening are the match of any disaster film, but while Hollywood blockbusters would then follow a series of pretty stars who are neither physically or emotionally affected by the devastation, director Feng Xiaogang focuses on the bleak horror of the earthquake's aftermath - both immediate, as shattered families wander aimlessly and broken bodies are lined up, and in subsequent years, where the trauma of that night follows al the characters involved.

The film unashamedly pulls at the heartstrings, but never to the point of melodrama, and the acting of the leads is flawless (sadly, the same can't be said of the one Western character who pops up - thankfully briefly - towards the end), bringing a sense of realism and emotional rawness to the story. Only the most cynical, dead inside viewer will fail to be drawn into this story and find the odd lump in the throat as the story progresses.

Beautiful, haunting and powerful, this may well be my film of the year.

DAVID FLINT

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