General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

A Writer's Odyssey (刺杀小说家)

A Writer's Odyssey (刺杀小说家) is a 2021 Chinese fantasy action film directed by Lu Yang (路阳), adapted from a short story of the same name by the writer Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛). It follows a father who takes a contract to kill a novelist, while the novelist's fantasy fiction begins to alter events in the real world.¹ The film was released in mainland China on 12 February 2021, the Spring Festival holiday slot, runs 130 minutes, and is in Mandarin.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenwriters	Lu Yang; screenplay by Chen Shu, Yu Yang, Qin Haiyan, and Lu Yang¹
Source	Short story "A Writer's Odyssey" by Shuang Xuetao¹
Release	12 February 2021 (mainland China), 130 minutes, Mandarin²
Principal cast	Lei Jiayin, Yang Mi, Dong Zijian, Yu Hewei, Guo Jingfei¹
Box office	Total gross passed 1 billion yuan by 14 March 2021; third place in the 2021 Spring Festival slot¹^•³
Visual effects	2,003 VFX shots among nearly 2,700 total; all effects made by the Chinese company MOREVFX⁴^•⁵
Recognition	Nominated for Best Visual Effects and Best Production Design at the 15th Asian Film Awards¹
Sequel	A Writer's Odyssey 2 released in the 2025 National Day slot⁶

Spoilers

Plot and adaptation

The story links two worlds. In the real world, Guan Ning (Lei Jiayin), a father whose daughter was abducted six years earlier, is hired to kill the struggling novelist Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian). In the novelist's serial fiction, set in an otherworldly imperial capital, the tyrannical god Red-Haired Demon (赤发鬼, played by Yi Yang) rules through slaughter, and the young hero Kongwen, guided by the one-eyed Black Armor (played by Guo Jingfei), sets out to kill the god.¹¹ As the novel progresses, its events begin to affect the real world, and the businessman Li Mu, whose fate mirrors the demon's, wants the writer dead before the story can end.¹^•⁴

Lu Yang said he read the story in 2016 and was moved by its theme of belief and hope, comparing the father's persistence to filmmaking itself. The adaptation changed the killer's motive: in the original story he takes the contract for money, while the film makes him a desperate father coerced with a lead on his missing daughter.⁴

Sequel

A sequel, A Writer's Odyssey 2 (刺杀小说家2), directed again by Lu Yang with an original story by Shuang Xuetao and screenplay by Li Zelin, opened in China's 2025 National Day holiday slot. It earned about 1.01 billion...

Production and visual effects

The film took five years to make and was produced with an entirely Chinese crew, with every visual effect created by the domestic company MOREVFX.⁴^•⁵ It was the first Chinese film to integrate motion capture, facial capture, and virtual production in a single pipeline, and the first domestic film to use virtual shooting throughout.⁷^•³

The scale of the work was unusual for Chinese production at the time. The crew produced over 2,000 design drawings and 2,095 storyboard frames, built 170,000 square meters of sets over five months across more than 20 soundstages, including an 800-square-meter motion-capture stage with 120 cameras, then the largest in China. Of the film's nearly 2,700 shots, 2,003 are effects shots.⁴ MOREVFX put roughly 700 people on the film over about two years, supported by more than 200 workstations, over 300 render-farm machines, and thousands of cloud computing nodes.⁵

The Red-Haired Demon. The film's central digital character took close to three years to design and build, with the final look settled in autumn 2019, near the end of editing. The demon's body carries more than 900,000 individual hairs, and a single frame took 16 to 30 hours to render. Visual effects supervisor Xu Jian, who also worked on The Wandering Earth, considered the film harder than that production because of the density of fine detail and the need to create a distinct style rather than copy Hollywood; the demon's face alone went through dozens of revisions.⁴^•⁷ Three otherworld characters, the Red-Haired Demon, Red Armor, and Black Armor, were made entirely digitally, with Guo Jingfei's performance captured and translated onto Black Armor, a one-eyed figure whose emotions had to be conveyed through pupil dilation, tremor, and moving armor plates.⁸

Reception

The film earned about 600 million yuan during the Spring Festival run and passed 1 billion yuan in total by 14 March 2021, finishing third in the holiday slot.⁸^•¹^•³ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 93% Tomatometer from 14 reviews and a 73% audience score; on Douban it rates 6.5 from more than 700,000 users.⁹^•² Critics praised the visual ambition while faulting the script: Richard Kuipers of Variety wrote that from the halfway point "a hollowness creeps in," and Screen Daily's John Berra found the result verging on sensory overload but largely coherent and inventive.⁹^•¹⁰ It received nominations for Best Visual Effects and Best Production Design at the 15th Asian Film Awards.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 2020s › Fantasy films of the 2020s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?