Nanjing Photo Studio (also known as Dead to Rights), China’s 2025 summer box office hit, uses photography as a metaphor for history, memory, and justice during the Nanjing Massacre, with its most powerful scenes set in a portrait studio that embodies both personal dreams and collective trauma.
Nanjing Photo Studio (AKA Dead to Rights) is the box office champ in China for the summer of 2025. Set during a terrifying time of great trial and tribulation, it takes unexpected detours to highlight the role photography played in mid-twentieth century Chinese life before returning to the key theme of the camera as a potent weapon in the struggle for history and memory.
The literal focal point of the film (pun intended) is a sumptuous photography studio that represents the art of classic black and white portraiture at its commercial peak. On the walls of the well-to-do business establishment, which occupies a fine building at a prime location on a busy downtown corner, can be seen the stuff of dreams and memory: wedding photos, poignant portraits, glamorous grandees, starlets and groups of friends.
When that loving memory wall of fine photos is rudely stripped bare from the walls of Jaixing Photo Studio and replaced by sordid snaps of Japanese troops posing for victory photos in a fallen city, the film conveys the impact of the messy tragedy going on outside the doors of the studio in a simple, clean and dramatically satisfying way.
During this and other quiet points in the film, the power of photography is reflected upon in a relatively subtle, but utterly lucid and succinct way.
It is in such interludes, small scenes of metaphoric value that the director contributes something new to the overdone genre of anti-Japan films. Keeping the focus narrow makes it possible to create set pieces and telegraph ideas that can be grasped in their entirety.
In contrast, the rambling, erratic, violent, cruel, incendiary and tragic sequence of events during Japan’s takeover of China’s capital city, an “incident” known to the world as the Nanjing Massacre, is much harder to convincingly reconstruct on film, let alone contemplate and comprehend.
Set director Qin Feng did a superlative job of establishing the devastated look and gritty feel of a fallen city on an extensive outdoor set representing wartime Nanjing. The period architecture, shop signs, utility poles, market stalls and city walls are crafted with greater care than that of many other Japan war productions, and can be said to rival the carefully-researched, artfully filmed street scenes of Empire of the Sun (1987), a major Hollywood film set and filmed in Shanghai during the same period.
The Nanjing set (built at Shanghai Film and Television Park) is gritty, with many buildings bombed out, blackened or burnt down in a way that looks true to history. The occupation of Shanghai involved fewer battles and less wholesale destruction than the doomed, last-stand popular defense of the then-capital, Nanjing, so it was possible to dress the set of real Shanghai streets in the making of Empire of the Sun.
Shanghai’s capitulation to Japanese rule was not pretty, but it was moderated by the diplomatic complications of it being an international city with distinct zones of British, French, Japanese and local sovereignty.
There’s a moment in Steven Spielberg’s production, which I worked on as a personal assistant to the director and production interpreter, where the camera turns to a hand-painted portrait of Wang Jingwei, the former KMT general who changed sides and became Japan’s puppet leader. A parallel scene takes place in the Nanjing film, except the personage on the portrait being taken down is Chiang Kai-shek.
Whether or not this is a directorial tip of the hat to Spielberg, this kind of attention to detail is one of the strengths of the Shen Ao film produced by the Shanghai Film Group. The short sweep of the camera, a seemingly throwaway shot, references the tale of changing portraits, accurately reflecting the different status of the two occupied cities, the more cosmopolitan one, already compromised by lack of local sovereignty, deftly accommodating itself to Japanese rule, while the native capital, the symbolic center of free China, resists to the bitter end.
Spielberg’s exploration of wartime Shanghai had a peculiarly ambivalent view of Japan, which reflects the ambivalence of the source material, J.G. Ballard’s book, Empire of the Sun. Ballard’s seemingly odd view was not unearned'; the story of a British boy surviving by his wits after his parents are taken into detention by the Japanese soldiers in Shanghai is his own story, give or take a bit of creative license.
Empire of the Sun was not just faithful to the lead character’s boyish, at times irrational, admiration for Mitsubishi Zero fighters and Japanese military prowess, but went to great lengths to show that not all Japanese were the same. Even in the prison camp sequences, tentative cross-cultural friendships were forged.
During a quiet moment during the location shooting near Nanjing Road on a back street dressed up to look like wartime Shanghai, Spielberg told me at the time he was interested in doing another war film, this time set in Europe, that would draw on the idea of a nuanced enemy. He made the film, known to the world as Schindler’s List, a few years later to great acclaim.
During the first part of Nanjing Photo Studio, director Shen Ao appears to be emulating the dramatic notion of a nuanced enemy, creating some three-dimensional Japanese characters in addition to the usual cardboard cut-out bad guys. There are Japanese who speak Chinese and are interested in Chinese culture, and there is a visiting Japanese official who condemns the excess violence, pointing to the importance of international reputation. This is congruent with known facts about the badly botched-up taking of Nanjing, but at some point in the film, the humanitarian elements to the plot gets lost in an orgy of horror film violence and all nuance is lost. Even the three-dimensional Japanese characters turn out not just to be evil, but evil in all three dimensions.
When trying to convey the horror of particularly brutal invasion and cruel occupation, it may seem frivolous to focus on how the actors playing the bad guys are portrayed, but as Spielberg demonstrated so movingly, offering a glimpse of the humanity on both sides, however compromised it is by the context of war, makes for a deeper, more reflective movie.
The most reflective moments of Shen Ao’s film take place in the confines of the studio, exploring photography as a metaphor.
Photographers take aim at and shoot their subjects. Canisters of film are compared to bullet casings. Capturing the moment a bullet strikes a body is treated like a dark art. Photos of Japanese soldiers take precedence over photos of Chinese civilians.
One man’s victory photo is another man’s proof of criminality.
Portraits taken in past times of peace bear witness to the terror of the present, while pictures taken in the present will bear witness in the future.
On the far end of the viewfinder, subjects are singled out. Time is stopped, literally for the victim of the bullet, in symbolic terms for the subject of a photo. Like the technology of war, photography is a technology that can be used to attack or defend, for ill or for good, and sometimes even change the course of history.
In directorial terms, Shen Ao brings considerable nuance to a Chinese wannabe actress and singsong girl who is obnoxious, selfish, snobby, haughty and hard to like but who turns out in the end to be the most endearing character, if not the most heroic, despite herself. Played by Gao Ye, a native of Jiangsu, her charming regional accent adds to her credibility in the role.
That’s good film-making.
But the handling of other characters, also fictional, is not as adept. To put it in terms of Chinese idiom, Shen Ao’s film started out roaring like a tiger and ended up slithering away like a snake.
The battle scenes are strong, the separate peace of the photography studio is ripe with symbolism, but the ending, entirely fictional, in which the refugees of the studio get killed off and meet grisly endings one by one, portrayed in unduly graphic ways, is a misstep. It’s as if the film undergoes a genre shift midway from an epic war film to narrow horror film that descends into slasher film territory.
Although fictional fancy overtakes fealty to reality as the film drifts listlessly towards the end, the overall narrative effectively drives home the point that photographs can be used as instruments of justice, such as in a war crimes trial, and more generally as an aide-memoire to “never forget."
