Decoded

2024 2h 36m ZH

😐

6.2

MID

★6.2TMDB · 24

DramaHistoryThriller

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

In the 1940s, the world was in turmoil, and it was crucial to decipher the enemy's communication codes in a timely and accurate manner. Rong Jinzhen has shown amazing mathematical talent since her childhood, and because she solved the problems assigned by her math teacher, she was noticed by more people, and even walked into the door of code-breaking by mistake.

“Some stories are better left unspoiled.”

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Cast

Liu Haoran
容金珍
John Cusack
希伊斯
Chen Daoming
郑某
Daniel Wu
小黎黎（容小来）
Yu Feihong
叶筱凝（容太太）
Chen Sicheng
我
Ren Luyao
翟莉（小梅）
Chen Yusi
容必瑜

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Chen Sicheng
Writers: Chen Sicheng, Christopher MacBride, Mai Jia
Languages: Mandarin, English
Countries: China

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

RUNTIME

Did you know

Clocks in at 156 minutes — on the longer side of feature-length cinema.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

ERA

Did you know

Released 2 years ago.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

WORLD

Did you know

Dialogue crosses 2 languages: Mandarin, English.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Chen Sicheng, shot by Cao Yu. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by Lorne Balfe. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Liu Haoran and John Cusack and Chen Daoming carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt31888816 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

Only 24 TMDB ratings — you're getting ahead of the curve on this one.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Chen Sicheng directs. Cao Yu behind the camera. Lorne Balfe scores. Produced in China. Dialogue in Mandarin, English.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Clocks in at 156 minutes — on the longer side of feature-length cinema.
2Released 2 years ago.
3Dialogue crosses 2 languages: Mandarin, English.
4Directed by Chen Sicheng, shot by Cao Yu. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
5Original score by Lorne Balfe. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
6Liu Haoran and John Cusack and Chen Daoming carry the top of the cast.
7IMDB entry: tt31888816 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
8Only 24 TMDB ratings — you're getting ahead of the curve on this one.

The technical file

Cinematography: Cao Yu
Original score: Lorne Balfe
Runtime: 156 min · 2h 36m
Status: Released
Box office: $47,219,400
Original language: ZH
IMDB: Decoded (2024)

Also by

Chen Sicheng

Trailers & featurettes

Watch the pieces

Community reviews

What people are saying

CinemaSerf2024-08-27
★ 6/10
There are quite a few similarities with "The Man Who Knew Infinity" (2015) in this film about the prodigious mathematical genius of Rong Jinzhen. By pure fluke, his problem-solving skills are spotted by teacher (Daniel Wu) who adopts the orphaned, rather subdued, boy into his close-knit family and provides him the opportunity to thrive. Over the next couple of hours we watch him (Haoran Liu) develop into an academic then into a man crucial to the efforts of his embryonic country as it struggles to recover from years of internal strife and to compete with the more established regional powers like the UK and the USA. It's to that latter nation that his Polish-born mentor "Liseiwicz" (John Cusack) escapes when the Kuomintang government in China falls and the communists take over - and these two men, on opposite sides of the world, soon become the epitome of intellectual rivals with the erstwhile pupil now working for the Chinese equivalent of Bletchley Park trying to keep pace with the incredibly complex "purple" and "black" ciphers being developed by the American National Security Agency. What's clear is the two men are being manipulated but their respective states and that is having - as Lieseiwicz predicted early on - quite a profound effect on their respective mental health and on Jinzhen's marriage to Ye Xiaoning. I quite liked the innovative way in which director Sicheng Chen tried to tell this tory. His use of the bizarre and the surreal amidst the more standard photography serves to give us an insight into just how un-lateral the thinking of these two men was when developing and cracking these codes with billions of potential permutations. The use of chess as a theme testing intellectual rigour works quite well too as does the sense that these two men and being used to play a game by their superiors that always looks likely to end in stalemate. Cusack does fine here, though maybe he over-does the maniacal aspects of his thought processes a little, but it's Haoran Liu who delivers more engagingly as the geeky, socially inept, scientist whose brain becomes like a train running out of control. This does have a slight element of jingoism to the narrative, the People's Republic being the bastion of all freedoms fighting the Imperialist West, but that's really only a sideline as the story of one man's impressive skills with cerebral gymnastics unfolds. It is too long: it does plod at times, but when it hits it's stride, it's interesting and attempts to show us a little of the character of these two men against a backdrop of a good looking production. A story of two addicts, really.

Production companies