Cremator (2012)

• 57%
• 2012
• Drama
• Peng Tao

In some rural communities in northern China, the "ghost wife" trade has become an unusual accompaniment to customary funerary rites: rather than allowing them to pass into the afterlife unwed, deceased bachelors are posthumously married off to dead unmarried women. This unique and sometimes controversial custom provides the narrative engine for Peng Taos The Cremator, a moving portrait of an undertaker who resolves to end his loneliness with a posthumous union.Presiding over a small local mortuary is the stoic Cao (Cheng Zhengwu), whose job it is to oversee burial rites for the towns departed a strict system based on a variety of factors: social rank, gender, prominence within the family, etc. in order to ensure a peaceful journey into the afterlife. Cremation, which is held in abhorrence by the community, is reserved only for those deceased whose remains go unclaimed by family or friends. This has led Cao and his friend Xie (Cao Xian) to develop a lucrative sideline selling unidentified corpses as "gate-passing spouses" to bereaved families wanting companions for their unwed, departed relatives to be buried with. Shortly after Cao discovers that his coughing fits are symptoms of a terminal illness, the police deliver an unidentified female suicide victim to the mortuary and Cao decides to take the young woman as his ghost wife upon his death. But the arrival of the womans sister Xiuqiao (Wolf Girl, who also plays the girls deceased twin), complicates Caos plan. Stricken with guilt, he confesses his intentions to the shocked Xiuqiao, who finds herself torn between fidelity to her sister and the growing kinship she feels for the deeply lonesome undertaker.Poetic, sombre and bittersweet, The Cremator unfolds with an intoxicatingly languorous rhythm, mining the intricacies of mourning rituals for both pathos and gentle humour. Caos tentative relationship with Xiuqiao becomes a balm for his stark and lonely existence and as he moves ever closer to his inescapable end, one wonders whether even the most fleeting of connections we make in our lives have the power to resonate beyond the grave.