731 - Mark Reviews Movies

731, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

The "patients," more appropriately called prisoners and victims, of Unit 731, a secret facility that was run by the Japanese Army in occupied Manchuria before and during World War II, are systematically dehumanized by their captors in 731. The guards and researchers in this place don't acknowledge the names of their captives, only referring to them by assigned numbers, and do not even call them "people." They are "logs" in the eyes of those who keep them locked in cells without any knowledge of the passage of time, subject them to abhorrent "tests" that are nothing more than torture and grisly murder, and burn their remains in ovens in the basement.

All of this and more is communicated in gruesome detail in writer/director Linshan Zhao's movie, in which the plot is about an attempted escape from the eponymous facility. We meet a handful of prisoners, who come up with ingenious methods of passing information to each other right underneath the noses of the guards, but other than those few, the rest of the anonymous captives here only exist to show how inhumane and unthinkable the deeds done inside Unit 731 were.

Often, the story more closely resembles a horror movie—one in which the sights of skin being flayed from someone's hands, of frozen appendages and limbs being shattered by hammers, and of bodies exploding inside pressure chambers seem to be the main purpose. Zhao presents those moments in lengthy, detailed shots or stops the action entirely to ensure that we see some ghastly death in the backdrop. It wallows in pain, anguish, and the assorted practical and visual effects being used to bring such miseries to life.

What this approach doesn't do for this story, however, is to give a sense of the humanity of its victims—either the ones whose names we do learn, since they are so busy on planning an escape, or, especially, the ones who only appear to be tortured and/or killed in front of us. It's history in the form of a carnival geek show, which certainly makes us understand just how terrible the aims and methods of Unit 731 were but doesn't seem to care about communicating much else beyond those horrors.

Zhao's screenplay doesn't even give us a protagonist whose identity is a certainty here. He's a man known by his family name Wang (Wu Jiang) but whose given name changes over and over, depending on the story he wants others to believe. When we first meet him, he makes himself known as con artist of some kind, pointing out that has lived and made himself relatively comfortable with only his ability to sell people of certain ideas about him. One name, either his real one or another fake, has resulted in his detention in Unit 731.

Eventually, we discover that the man is or just the name belongs to a figure of some legend in Manchuria. He led the escape of prisoners from a fortress, and when fellow captive Cunshan (Zhiwen Wang) figures out that Wang very well might be that same man, Cunshan reveals a plan he has been devising for the prisoners here to escape.

That's the basic plot, and it is made up of assorted prisoners using various means of passing along the layout of the facility, distracting guards and wearing disguises, and employing the aid of a helpful mouse to bring things from one cell to another. The ingenuity on display is impressive and rather satisfying to discover as the plan comes together, Wang and Cunshan figure out how and when to best execute it, and the guards are none the wiser. Adding some basic—as in the most obvious—level of humanity are a pregnant woman (played by Qian Sun) and a young boy (played by Ziye Lin), who performs magic tricks with a traveling group of performers.

Otherwise, Zhao takes us into the laboratories and bowels of the facility, where those "experiments" are performed and piles of corpses are hacked to pieces next to furnaces. The filmmaker isn't merely observing these acts. His camera gets close and moves with eager fluidity from one screaming victim to the next. At times, it uses some other trickery to heighten the horror, such as close-ups of fleas raining down on awaiting people and some shots of plague-infected rats leaping in slow-motion to bite the people trapped in a cell with them.

The plot in the background here involves a top-secret plan for the Japanese government to develop an even deadlier form of plague and unleash it on any part of the world not aligned with them. History tells us that at least some of this is true, but the portrayal of the higher-ups in the Japanese government and military is so cartoonishly villainous that it falls more into the realm of over-the-top melodrama than believable inhumanity.

Zhao's intentions of revealing this awful piece of history seem genuine. The techniques of 731 to actually communicate them, though, end up feeling exploitative and, hence, disingenuous.

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