Shot on a summer evening in the outskirts of Beijing on only two hour-long DV tapes, Martian Syndrome’s is a personal documentary that unfolds with the power of Beckett’s later works as its grainy Sony NightShot aesthetic envelopes viewers in a world of desperation, confusion, fear, and nihilism. The rambling dialogues between four male youths – including the director himself, Xue Jianqiang – in Martin Syndrome are on par with any piece of absurdist theater, yet filmed utterly spontaneously, without any pre-scripting. With Xue’s use of the long take and his incisive interventions into the film’s temporality, Martian Syndrome registers the social dislocation and everyday violence of Chinese society in an appropriately ambivalent and haunting manner.
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