Raise the Red Lantern review – Gong Li gives a decade-defining performance in an addictively ruthless masterpiece

Gong simmers with rage, loneliness and humiliation as the ‘fourth mistress’ navigating the intimate political savagery of her husband’s compound in Zhang Yimou’s 1991 thriller

Revisiting Zhang Yimou’s grippingly addictive psychological drama from 1991, adapted from a novella by Su Tong, is a reminder of what a great impact this movie made on western audiences. They responded to its arguably westernised tale of a young woman’s desperate loneliness in a sinister environment that resembles something by Charlotte Brontë or Daphne du Maurier. Like Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans from the same year, Raise the Red Lantern opened our eyes to 20th-century China’s secret theatre of cruelty and misogyny; elaborate domestic rituals of submission and servitude coexisted with infinitely subtle plotting, resentful manoeuvring and covert denunciation, habits of thought that could…