northern china, the early nineties. bai (huang lu) is looking to make some money; she's just finished college, her family has debts and they're struggling to pay her younger brother's college fees. when she lands a job with a company who by and sell herbs, she finds herself travelling to a remote village, with the company's manager and his assistant.

whilst they go to inspect the produce, she stays with the farmer's family. the next morning, she wakes, finding that she has not been working for a legitimate company: she has been sold as a wife. naturally, she tries to explain what has happened but, with question marks over her integrity, accusations that she is trying to rip off the family and the fact that they have paid rmb7000 for her, she is trapped. trapped, alone and doomed to spend her life as wife to a husband she doesn't know, in a village far from her old life: isolated, abused, alone. escape seems impossible...

this is the second film from li yang, who also wrote and directed the excellent 'blind shaft': an expose of corruption within mine workers in china. with 'blind mountain', li tackles the, once, common practice of women being sold as wives, who are little more than vessels to bear the children of the men whose family's have purchased them.

the care-free tone, of the first five minutes of the film, swiftly disappears, turning into the story of bai's ordeal and her attempts to contact her family and escape from the village. the distinct rejection of melodrama, in li's style, and a great central performance from huang lu make this a compelling, if difficult, watch.

the film plays out, almost like a horror film, with our protagonist trapped in a seemingly idyllic location, where no-one can be trusted and escape seems to be an impossibility. the resignation of others who have been through the same experience and the complicit nature of the locals only serves to heighten the infuriatingly hopeless nature of bai's predicament. whilst fleeting moments of hope serve only to compound the horror of the situation...

good, but not easy...