By Elisabeth Vincentelli, published 8 July 2022

At first glance, it looks as if this Chinese film is about the effects of an ingestible app (it comes inside an orange-ish pill) called Guidance, which allows people to detect when their interlocutors aren’t telling the truth. The consequences of being able to instantly spot lies would make for a possible companion piece to John Carpenter’s underrated “They Live” (1988), in which special sunglasses let the wearer see subliminal messages and aliens passing as human. But the interest of Neysan Sobhani’s movie lies elsewhere: What drives the invention of a potentially world-changing technology? It’s hard to watch this film and not muse about what Facebook might have been like if Mark Zuckerberg had had different motivations at Harvard.

The key to the story is Han Miao (Sun Jia), a woman who once got stuck in a panic room with Su Jie (Francesco Chen), the tech mogul running the company that unleashed Guidance into the world. What happened in that room is reconstructed in a series of flashbacks as the young woman shares the memory with her boyfriend, Mai Zi Xuan (Harry Song). With events like a recent “great war” only mentioned in passing, the film is essentially a sleek three-person relationship drama, but Sobhani spices it up with slow-building suspense that rewards patience — for protagonists and viewers alike.