Bai (Bai Baihe) arrives in Luomu, the quiet village where her long-separated lover Wang once resided. The journey is prompted by a postcard from him, bearing only the enigmatic words: “The gloaming in Luomu.” Bai begins to walk its streets—so compact a place that one could circle it in less than an hour— yet she paces it again and again, as if tracing the contours of memory. Along her wandering, she encounters Liu (Liu Dan), the keeper of a modest guesthouse, his partner Huang (Huang Jianxin), and Liu’s drinking companion Xiaopeng. Through these encounters, the echoes of Wang’s three years in Luomu begin to emerge. In turn, Bai herself reveals to Liu fragments of her own past—marked by a lingering intimacy with death. Zhang Lu, who relocated his artistic practice from Korea to China, here presents his third feature following Yanagawa and The Shadowless Tower. Gloaming in Luomu converses with his earlier films. Like Choi Hyun (Park Hae-il) in Gyeongju, Bai’s return to the vestiges of an old love opens the way into the narrative. Her quiet assimilation into the rhythms of Luomu recalls Yoon-young in Ode to the Goose. And the finely wrought gestures, words, and textures that define the film inevitably call to mind Fukuoka. But there are divergences as well. The actor, Bai Baihe’s own name and personal qualities seep into the role, lending it an air of lived intimacy. Members of the production crew even appear within the film, gently unsettling the line between cinema and life. That porousness extends further: Bai, numbing her grief with drink, occasionally meets the gaze of a spectral figure, conversing with it. A series of point-of-view shots, seemingly belonging to the phantom, frustrate any certainty of truth. As Bai drifts deeper into Luomu, her purpose becomes less clear. The conversations with Liu increasingly seem to prefigure Bai’s own yet-unlived future. Within this liminal space of Luomu—part dream, part purgatory—fantasy and reality, life and death, past and future overlap and dissolve, and those who inhabit it remain suspended in ceaseless encounters and farewells. What might have scattered into fragments is instead woven into coherence by Zhang Lu’s supple and lyrical hands. Gloaming in Luomu gathers together the signatures of Zhang Lu’s cinema. Yet rather than yielding to repetition, he reshapes them through experiment, summoning a renewed sensibility of perception. Refusing the comfort of what he has already achieved, Zhang strides into the unknown with quiet boldness. The ending of Gloaming in Luomu feels very much like an extension of the director’s experiment. Watch closely how Bai, after what seems like an endless drift through Luomu, comes to make her final choice.