The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be as bad for movies as it was for movie theatres. Few films that confront the pandemic head on have illuminated the experience, and the most enduring COVID movie to date has been a bauble: Nicole Kidman’s promotional trailer for AMC Theatres, which was released in 2021 to revive enthusiasm for moviegoing once theatres reopened. Now the Chinese director Lou Ye, with his latest feature, “An Unfinished Film,” has taken the Kidman trailer a radical step further: where the AMC commercial alludes to the effect of the pandemic on the movie business, Lou’s film dramatizes COVID’s effect on filmmaking itself.

“An Unfinished Film” is, at one level, a historical drama, looking back at the arrival and spread of the virus in China in order to observe its effect on the lives of ordinary people—including ones involved in the extraordinary activity of making films. The action starts in July, 2019, and revolves around an unfinished film that a Beijing-based director named Xiaorui shot ten years earlier and now hopes to finish. But Lou’s film is also an elaborately self-reflexive blend of fiction and nonfiction. For starters, the director Xiaorui is played by Mao Xiaorui, who is himself a director, and Lou expands the dramatic story by including actual footage of life during the pandemic. More dizzyingly, the unfinished film within the film is made up of already extant footage that Lou shot a decade or more ago, and the plot of “An Unfinished Film” involves fictional characters from Lou’s earlier films. In effect, Lou—who wrote the script with his wife and longtime co-writer, Ma Yingli, who’s also a director—treats all of the found footage, both nonfiction and fiction, as equally archival, equally a record of history. The vertiginous condensing of fiction and nonfiction, of past and present, has a radically destabilizing effect that’s inseparable from the audacity of Lou’s political vision.

At the start of the movie, the footage from the unfinished film within a film is trapped on an old computer. After Xiaorui’s assistants succeed in getting the computer to work and rescuing the footage, Xiaorui invites one of its lead actors, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), to view it with him. (Qin also played the main character, also called Jiang, in Lou’s film “Spring Fever,” from 2009, and footage from that shoot is included here.) After they’ve watched, Xiaorui asks Jiang to join him and other crew members in finishing the film. The plan is to shoot in a southern city and ten years later pick up the same character, who is now involved in the region’s real-estate boom. The main complication is that, a decade ago, Jiang was young and unknown, with time on his hands, whereas now he’s a professional actor, much in demand, and finds it hard to schedule time for the shoot. Moreover, he’s married and his wife is expecting their first child, due in December. He nonetheless grudgingly agrees to join Xiaorui and the rest of the cast and crew to do the new shoot in late January, 2020.

You can guess much of the rest: as rumors spread about a new viral infection in Wuhan, near the shooting location, a crew member falls ill, and “An Unfinished Film” becomes a tense thriller, an experiential tick-tock account of the ramp-up from rumors and fears to a total transformation of daily life and Chinese society at large. As lockdowns quickly spread across the country, the cast and crew are not only quarantined in their hotel but also isolated in their rooms, banned from assembling and even from entering the corridors. Their food and any other necessities are brought to the doors of their rooms by workers in hazmat suits, and security personnel are on hand to enforce—violently, if need be—the guests’ involuntary solitary confinement. The collective drama coalesces around Jiang, whose wife, Sang Qi (Qi Xi), is on lockdown in their Beijing home with their newborn baby girl. In the couple’s extensive video calls, Jiang shows and tells her about the spread of the infection, the prevalence of ambulances, the conditions they endure; with his phone, he records things that he sees from his hotel room—including a woman wailing in an alley behind the hotel as an ambulance takes away her mother’s body.

Working as a filmmaker in China and negotiating its ever-shifting system of censorship, Lou—who turns sixty this month and began making films in the early nineties—has always been a cinematic shapeshifter. His films do far more than their contours suggest, opening covert portals into forbidden zones by way of allusions and omissions, wry ricochets and conspicuous silences. For instance, his dazzlingly intricate gangster drama “Suzhou River,” from 2000, becomes a quasi-documentary report of police corruption and underworld violence, told from the point of view of an anonymous character, who is a videographer—essentially a filmmaker who dares not disclose his name. Lou pushed the boundaries of literal and overt expression in China with his 2006 historical drama, “Summer Palace,” set against the background of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and, when he screened it without permission from censors, he was officially banned from filmmaking in China for five years. During the ban, he clandestinely made “Spring Fever”—in which the character Jiang made his début—which was one of the first modern mainland-Chinese films to explicitly depict homosexual relationships. In that movie, Jiang was a gay man, and he also portrays a gay man in the resurfaced footage; Jiang now expresses doubt to Xiaorui that the film, once completed, will pass the more stringent censorship now in place. (To add another layer of self-reference, the character of Jiang’s wife, Sang, as played by Qi, previously appeared in Lou’s 2012 film, “Mystery,” which also co-stars Qin.)

The movie’s over-all arc is a common one: from the unquestioned routines of daily life to the strange new normal of risks and precautions, fears and constraints, illness and deaths; from there to an eventual sense of wary relief. Yet every bit as crucial to “An Unfinished Film” as its overt story are its ambiguous shifts between fiction and nonfiction, the howling gap between past and present. The film’s silences and dodges are blaring warnings: don’t believe what you see; assume that what’s presented as fact may be as much of a fabrication as what’s presented as fiction; and be aware that what’s presented as fiction may mask realities far more horrifying than can be shown. Occasionally, there are hints about where to aim skepticism, as when a real-life article shows a doctor, Li Wenliang, whose early warnings about COVID got him officially denounced as a rumor-monger, and who—as another clip makes clear—died of the virus in February, 2020. The movie doesn’t show that his death led to an outpouring of on-line protest, deploring his silencing and demanding freedom of speech. A flashpoint of yet more vehement dissent that “An Unfinished Film” does show is a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, in 2022, which resulted in deaths that many believed to be caused by stringent lockdown policies. Lou’s archival footage shows both the fire and the widespread, even violent protests that followed.

“An Unfinished Film” has some revealing parallels with Lou’s most recent previous film, the virtuosic historical thriller “Saturday Fiction,” from 2019. That film was a paranoid round robin of espionage and betrayal, set in 1941, in the artistic world of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, filmed in such a way as to pointedly implicate contemporary China—oppressed, infiltrated, censored, surveilled, and depicted glossily. In “An Unfinished Film,” he subjects COVID-related protocols to similar treatment. In Lou’s vision, the ongoing lockdown—the ubiquitous, harassing security forces, the intrusive I.D. checks and temperature readings, the pervasive information-gathering—comes off as both a symbol of a regime of surveillance and censorship and a relentless intensification of that system.

Needless to say, many Americans also considered COVID-related restrictions to be oppressive and intrusive. Here, of course, there was no suppression of their protest, no political obstacle to public discussion, and yet there was a stream of denials, deflections, confusions, and outright falsehoods issuing from the Trump Administration. (Anyone try those bleach injections?) The parallels between official pandemic responses in China and in the United States are the subject of Nanfu Wang’s great 2021 documentary, “In the Same Breath,” the only other film I’ve seen from the COVID era which rises to its enormous political, personal, and historical crises. Lou, by centering filmmaking itself in the vortex of the epochal catastrophe, also suggests that his own film is unfinished, a mere beginning, just a fragment of the mighty work demanded of filmmakers to reckon with the grief, the loss, the disruptions, and the manipulations of this grave new world. “We come to this place for magic,” Kidman tells us in the AMC pitch, and Lou has the artistry and the audacity to reveal the sleight of hand on which that magic relies. In the theatre, as Kidman says, “stories feel perfect and powerful.” Lou breaks apart the veneer of narrative perfection, in order to show where the power lies. ♦