The Madman’s Face of the Professional God: Projection, Shame, and the Dissolution of Self in Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows: Projection, Shame, and the Dissolution of Self in Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows

I want to make an argument that might sound, at first, like a joke: Only the River Flows (2023), Wei Shujun’s neo-noir adaptation of Yu Hua’s novella Mistakes by the River, is not a murder mystery. It is a film about a man who is terrified of becoming a father. The murder is incidental. The investigation is a symptom. And the landscape of suspects, witnesses, and victims that detective Ma Zhe moves through across 102 rain-soaked minutes is not a town in rural 1990s China. It is the interior of his own unconscious, dressed in period costume and shot on 16mm film.

I say this not as provocation but as a clinical observation. I am a trauma therapist, and I watch films the way I sit with patients: attending to what is not said, to the symbolic weight of what keeps appearing, to the structural logic underneath the presenting problem. When I watched Only the River Flows, what I saw was not simply a detective losing his grip on reality. I saw a man doing something recognizable, distributing the weight of an unbearable internal conflict outward onto the figures around him, and then pursuing those figures with the urgency of someone who genuinely believes the danger is outside himself. Ma is not cynical or calculating in this. He is, in the way that makes projection so insidious, completely sincere.

The film opens with a Camus epigraph: “There is no understanding fate, therefore I choose to play the part of fate. I wear the foolish, unintelligible face of a professional god.” It is worth sitting with how universal that impulse actually is, when we cannot make sense of what is happening to us. When the disorder is internal, formless, and without a clear cause, we reach for narrative. We look for the source. We appoint ourselves, quietly and without fanfare, to the task of finding out who or what is responsible. This is not pathology in any exceptional sense. It is one of the more human things we do. The problem is not the impulse itself but what happens when the search turns outward to avoid turning inward, when the thing we are really trying to locate is something we cannot bear to find in ourselves.

Ma Zhe is not a power-hungry man. He is earnest, conscientious, and genuinely troubled by the inadequacy of the evidence against the Madman. He resists pressure from his superior to close the case and declare it resolved. He is, by any reasonable measure, trying to do the right thing. He is also a man in the middle of a private crisis that has no clean shape and no obvious solution. A murder investigation, of all possible contexts, is a uniquely structured arena for this kind of displacement. It provides what ordinary life rarely does: a legitimate, socially sanctioned reason to locate disorder in another person and pursue it relentlessly. The detective role institutionalizes what the unconscious is already attempting. It gives the search a name, a procedure, and a warrant. In this sense, Ma’s position is not incidental to what unfolds psychologically. It is the setting that makes the unconscious drama visible: a stage built precisely for the kind of externalization that all of us, under enough pressure, are capable of.

To understand why, we need to understand what Ma is running from. Early in the film, we learn that his wife’s pregnancy has revealed a genetic abnormality of a ten percent chance that the child will be mentally defective. Ma wants to abort. His wife does not. The argument that follows is one of the film’s few moments of direct confrontation. Ma does offer a reason: he asks his wife to consider how the child itself would feel, growing up defective in a world that has no patience for defectiveness. It is not an unreasonable thing to say. But the urgency underneath it, the need that drives the argument, exceeds what compassion for the child can fully account for. The viewer is left to sense what the film already knows: the threatened child is not only a child to Ma. It is a mirror.

This is where schema theory becomes useful. In schema therapy, a core schema of defectiveness/shame refers to the deeply held belief that one is fundamentally flawed, broken, or inferior, and that if others were to see one’s true interior, they would inevitably reject or condemn. It is one of the earliest and most tenacious schemas, typically rooted in childhood experiences of criticism, humiliation, or conditional love. The person who carries it does not experience their defectiveness as a belief. They experience it as a fact, something simply true about them, as obvious and fixed as a physical characteristic. And because it is intolerable to hold that fact consciously, they develop elaborate strategies to manage it: overachievement, control, or most relevantly here, projection.

Ma carries this schema with unmistakable clarity. We are shown that he believes he received a Grade Three Merit Certificate during his time in Yunnan. It is a recognition that would anchor his sense of professional worth, proof against the inner conviction of inadequacy. But the certificate cannot be found. His childhood friend does not remember it. The very evidence of his value exists only in his own account of himself, unverifiable by anyone else. This is not presented as a minor character detail. It is the film’s diagnosis of Ma delivered early and quietly, before the murders escalate and before his grip on reality has visibly loosened. He has always been uncertain of his own foundations. The investigation did not destabilize him. It simply made the pre-existing destabilization visible.

The genetic mutation in the unborn child lands on this schema with devastating precision. If the child is defective, and the child is his, then the defect is his. This is not a rational inference. It is the logic of shame, which does not follow causality so much as contamination. Ma does not think his way to this conclusion. He feels it, immediately and viscerally, and the feeling is intolerable. And so he does what some people with an entrenched defectiveness/shame schema does when the shame becomes unbearable: he projects it outward. He finds a container for it in the world, and that container is the Madman.

In object relations theory, projection is the psychic mechanism by which an unwanted internal experience is evacuated from the self and attributed to another person or object. Projective identification goes further: the projector not only attributes the quality to the other but unconsciously acts in ways that pressure the other to embody it, to become the container for what cannot be tolerated internally. What makes Ma’s relationship to the Madman so psychologically rich is that he is genuinely, consciously ambivalent about the Madman’s guilt. He does not believe the evidence is sufficient. He resists the institutional pressure from his superior to close the case and declare it solved. His professional instinct tells him the Madman is not the killer. And yet he cannot stop circling him. The ambivalence is the tell. Ma’s conscious mind knows the Madman may be innocent while his unconscious keeps returning to him anyway. Not because the case demands it, but because the Madman is carrying something that belongs to Ma. He has been designated the container for what Ma cannot hold internally, and the projection has its own gravity independent of guilt or innocence. The institution orders Ma to pursue the Madman; the unconscious had already been doing so for reasons the institution could never name.

But the Madman also represents Ma’s unborn child. This places the film’s use of condensation in an extraordinary way. Condensation, as Freud described it in The Interpretation of Dreams, is the mechanism by which a single dream figure absorbs the emotional charge of multiple distinct objects or persons, compressing them into one image that can be processed by the dreaming mind. Only the River Flows is structured on this principle, not just in its literal dream sequences but in its entire cast of characters. The Madman is simultaneously the defective child Ma fears, the externalized shame he cannot contain, and the version of himself he is in the process of becoming. He is one figure carrying three unbearable meanings. This does not require Ma to consciously believe the Madman is guilty– and crucially, he does not. The unconscious does not need conviction. It needs a container. Ma’s ambivalence about the Madman’s guilt is precisely what makes the condensation visible: he keeps returning to a man he suspects is innocent because something other than the case is pulling him there.

The temple scene crystallizes this with the film’s most precise symbolic gesture. Ma hallucinates shooting the Madman inside a temple, and the blood spatters across a faded mural of a wrathful blue deity, a dharmic protector figure, the kind whose function is to destroy demons and guard the boundary between order and chaos. Ma is enacting the god role that the Camus epigraph assigned him, performing a divine elimination in a sacred space. But it is a hallucination. He fires no shots. The unconscious stages the ritual and the conscious mind cannot complete it, which is why the actual killing, when it finally comes, happens not in a temple but in the mud by the river, with a rock. There is no god in that moment. There is only a man.

What makes the film’s architecture so remarkable is that this dynamic does not stay contained within Ma and the Madman. It fractures and refracts across the entire cast, so that almost every character can be read as a different iteration of Ma’s internal conflict, like a different angle on the same wound. This is the fractal logic of the unconscious: we do not project cleanly onto a single object. We distribute fragments of the unbearable across the entire relational field, and every figure we encounter becomes a surface for some aspect of what we cannot metabolize internally.

Xu Liang, the cross-dressing hairdresser, is perhaps the most devastating example. Like Ma, Xu Liang carries a core schema of defectiveness/shame. But where Ma’s manifests as projection and compulsive pursuit of external validation, Xu Liang’s turns inward. He hides. He lives out his true identity in stolen moments, away from the institutional gaze that has already punished him for who he is. He has been unjustly detained before. He knows the machinery will consume him regardless of his guilt. When Ma’s investigation corners him, Xu Liang asks to be arrested. Not as confession, but as surrender to an inevitability he has always known. His defectiveness schema tells him he is already condemned. The world confirms it. He dies not because he is guilty, but because he believed, correctly, that innocence would not protect him.

Ma’s investigation destroys Xu Liang. This is the film’s indictment of what happens when shame is projected rather than metabolized: one man’s compulsive exposure of others annihilates another man’s careful concealment. Ma cannot sit with his own interior, so he drags everything into the light. And for someone like Xu Liang, whose survival depended on the dark, the light is lethal. Xu Liang also functions, in the film’s condensed symbolic logic, as a figure for Ma’s wife: another person whose authentic interior Ma cannot access or hold. His wife assembles a puzzle of the Virgin Mary in silence while pregnant; Xu Liang assembles a feminine identity in secret. Both are doing something private and essential that Ma’s presence disrupts. Neither can be truly seen by him.

And then there is the mysterious woman with long wavy hair. It is the figure Wang Hong reports seeing fleeing the scene of the first murder. She haunts the investigation. Ma pursues her. She keeps slipping away. In my reading, she maps onto Ma’s wife– the feminine presence he cannot locate or hold, the figure associated with the pregnancy and all it threatens. The revelation that this woman is Xu Liang in disguise does not dissolve the symbolism but deepens it. Ma’s image of the feminine was always a projection. The thing he was chasing was never what he thought it was. The film tells him, as it tells us, that he does not actually see his wife. He sees something he has assembled from anxiety and need, a construction as fragile and contingent as Xu Liang’s dress and hair.

Wang Hong and Qian Ling, the secret lovers, function as a foil to Ma and his wife, but it is a foil that illuminates through contrast rather than similarity. Wang Hong and Qian Ling communicate through cassette tapes, hidden messages layered beneath popular songs: intimacy that is real, tenacious, and entirely private. It cannot survive institutional exposure. And it doesn’t. When Ma’s investigation touches them, Hong dies, the love letter is delivered to Qian Ling and immediately reclaimed as evidence, and what remains is a woman holding nothing. Meanwhile, Ma’s wife, who is also surviving, also left holding something she largely holds alone, assembles the Virgin Mary puzzle in silence, a sacred mother image constructed piece by piece in a household where the husband cannot bring himself to want the child. The parallel is quiet and brutal. Both women endure. Both lose something essential to the machinery of Ma’s pursuing.

The film’s dream sequences make its structural logic explicit. In the extended sequence that critics have called the film’s pièce de résistance, the persons of interest in the case appear as dream figures. And in the grammar of dream work, all figures in a dream are aspects of the dreamer. The case becomes entirely internal. Ma is not investigating a murder; he is moving through the chambers of his own unconscious, encountering projected fragments of himself at every turn. The Madman. The elusive woman. The hairdresser. The secret lovers. They are all him – different aspects of the conflict he cannot face directly, wearing borrowed faces and inhabiting a borrowed landscape.

This is why the mystery is never solved. Critics have noted the film’s refusal of resolution with varying degrees of frustration, as though it were a structural flaw or an artistic affectation. But the mystery was never external. You cannot arrest an internal conflict. You cannot close a case that is not a case. The film’s ambiguity is its most honest gesture: the investigation ends not with a solution but with a dissolution.

And Ma dissolves. The film traces, with clinical precision, the process by which he crosses from projection into identification. From the detective who hunts the Madman to the man who becomes him. The moment of crossing is almost imperceptible. When Ma imitates the Madman’s behavior by the river early in the film, when the Madman places a stone on Ma’s coat and later puts the coat on himself. These are not incidental images. They are the film marking the transfer. The role was always available to Ma. He has been approaching it from the beginning. Killing the Madman does not purge the madness. It completes the merger. The Madman disappears, and Ma takes his place.

The final scene gives Ma everything. The merit certificate. The healthy son. The warm domestic tableau. Every anxiety resolved simultaneously: the defective child did not materialize, the professional recognition finally arrived, the family is intact. It has the structure of wish fulfillment so complete it curves back into horror. And then the film glitches. The visual language of the dream sequences bleeds into what should be the resolution, and the boundary between psychosis and reality collapses entirely. We do not know whether this is real and Ma is still mad, or whether he is mad and he dreamed it. The film refuses to tell us– and the refusal is the point.

Because in either case, he never came back from the river. The certificate he could not prove he earned has arrived inside a sequence that cannot be trusted. The healthy child he wanted is bathed in light that flickers. The god who played fate has become the madman he condemned. He got everything he was supposed to want, and the glitch tells us it was not enough, could never have been enough, because the wound was not in the case. It was not in the child. It was not in the unverifiable merit from Yunnan.

It was in him, from the beginning, flowing underneath everything like a river that does not care whether you find the body or not.