Pursuit
- sombre
- kinetic
- intense
Sombre, breathless, measured wuxia / shaw-brothers, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Instructor Lin who is home from training the imperial troops for several years. He meets his wife and runs into his brother who has become a monk at the local temple. His superior Lord Gao, strangely decides to rape Lin's wife in the temple but Lin interrupts the crime. His brother is enraged and tries to kill Gao but Lin stops him with the help of Lin's training brother and old friend Lu who works for Gao. Lin is loyal to the Commissioner and will not do anything to harm his son. Once back at the Commissioner's house, Gao and Lu hatch a plan to discredit and eventually kill Lin all with the Commissioner's approval. The plan is put into motion and Lin is unjustly arrested for trespassing on imperial property.
Our read · Pursuit (1972) reads as a sombre, breathless, grounded wuxia · shaw-brothers · swordplay entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
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The shape of Pursuit
What watching it is actually like.
“You want 70s Hong Kong action drama with betrayal and temple showdowns.”
Skip it tonight — You dislike period martial arts or scenes of attempted assault.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
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