Master satirist Huang Jianxin‘s new film is a kind of thriller, but one with most of the generic thriller elements (fights, chases, arrests) left somewhere off-screen. As you might expect from a director responsible for the most acid dissections of Chinese society in the 1990s, the emphases are on humor, human foibles and the fallibility of ‘the system‘. Ye Minzhu (played by the splendidly hangdog Feng Gong) is a stolid, hardworking security guard who has a stable, sexual relationship with his girlfriend, shopowner Bai Lin. But two twists of fate turn his life upside-down. First, he and his ailing senior Lao Tian are assigned to a stake-out : they have to watch the suspected base of a gang of murderous robbers round the clock from an abandoned water-tower. second, a handsome former boyfriend of Bai‘s shows up, wanting to whisk her away to Tokyo. Ye nearly dies and nearly goes to jail for assault before we find out whether or not he‘ll get the girl, but the drama is rooted in character conflict, not generic thrills and spills. and Juang cunningly leaves one plot enigma unresolved: one of the film‘s greatest pleasures is seeing what he makes of a ‘mystical‘ relationship born from a misdialed phone number.