A Greimasian Semiotic Analysis of the Violence Narrative in the New Typical Chinese Crime Film Wrath of Silence

This study aims to examine how crime films released and distributed in mainland China reflect the country’s social context of crime and to further explore the cultural symbols embedded in their social representations. In this research, “new typical crime films” refers to Chinese crime cinema that, within the local sociocultural framework, centers on criminal events and attributes the causes of crime to deeper structural issues within society. The study draws upon A. J. Greimas’s narrative semiotics theory to analyze class consciousness within the specific social environments depicted in Chinese crime films, with Wrath of Silence (2018) as the primary case. As a new subgenre within contemporary Chinese crime cinema, this film stands out as distinctive among films released in the Chinese market for its depiction of social stratification. Through both surface and deep narrative analysis, the findings indicate that economic disparity and social imbalance between classes constitute the fundamental causes of violence among characters. The director seeks to expose how China’s upper class, in pursuit of exclusive control over power and interests, engages in primitive criminal acts and exercises hegemonic violence, thereby provoking retaliatory resistance.