Film noir typically involves a low key black & white visualization punctuated with sexual intrigue and motivation involving a cynical protagonist. Diao's film is a Chinese neo-noir trope and features a dissolute former detective and a widow with a dark secret. The film is drenched in neon and wintry industrial bleakness. Dismembered human remains are showing up in coal cars spread all over northern China. The dead man is identified as Liang Zhijun, husband to laundry worker and femme fatale Wu Zhizhen (Taiwanese actress). Now throw disgraced small town ex-cop Zhang Zilli into the mix, a gumshoe every bit as tough as Bogart. The movie portrays China as a place where human lives are expendable, relationships too. Conterio notes: Relationships are really just power struggles defined by emotional wants and needs. A presumptuous lawman believes that playing the white knight will end with the object of his fevered desire throwing her arms around him and love blossoming from the soil of prior disillusionment.
Bradshaw (The Guardian) points out the film pays homage to Sir Carol Reed's The Third Man, specifically the scene featuring a Ferris wheel reminiscent of the Vienna Ferris wheel featured in The Third Man. Soheil Rezayazdi opines: Diao also adds a nice dollop of surrealism to the proceedings. The film eludes our expectations with bursts of the bizarre: a horse shows up in an office building, a nightclub owner collapses into a bathtub mid-interview, fireworks erupt in the daytime. Black Coal, Thin Ice delivers the essentials of a pulpy noir, and it adorns them with the melancholic spirit and oddball charms of something we haven’t seen before.
From Wiki: The film's English title Black Coal, Thin Ice is different from its Chinese title Bai Ri Yan Huo, which translates literally as Daylight Fireworks. Diao Yinan came across this phrase from a friend of his. Diao further clarified the meaning of "daylight fireworks" as a state of sentiment or a state of condition. For him, the Chinese and English names together helped to construct the difference between reality and fantasy. In an interview he explained, "Coal and ice both belong to the realm of reality, but fireworks in daylight is something fantastic; they are the two sides of the same coin." The English name refers to the two visual clues in the film: coal as "where the body parts were found" and ice as "where the murder was committed". He further explained, "when the two are combined, the reality of this murder is constructed ... while daytime fireworks is a fantasy, it is what we use to coat ourselves from the cruel side of this real world."
Birchenough opines on the cinematography: Formally, Black Coal… is captivating: the director and his cinematographer Dong Jinsong move between long shots and more frequent tight ones, with as broad a palette of muted, melancholy colors as can be imagined. There’s every possible shade of darkish green and mustard yellow, ochres and olives, varied with deep blues and night greys. Conterio adds more: Jingsong Dong's cinematography is sublime. The film looks so beautiful. And neither is it a case of visual grandstanding for the sake of cinema's sake. There is subtlety at play that is quietly impressive. Whether it's a seasonal transition via a road tunnel - from clammy summer to the dead of winter - or faces bathed in colored electric light as they travel on a Ferris wheel in the dark. Mixing daytime exteriors and pastel tones with night-time garish neon, brings out not only neat pictorial contrasts, but also the rich poetic symbolism that envelopes the characters in their search for a second chance and an escape from the past.
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