General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Design of Death

Design of Death (杀生; Sha sheng) is a 2012 Chinese dark comedy-mystery film directed and written by Guan Hu, starring Huang Bo, Simon Yam, Alec Su, and Yu Nan. It was released in China on April 28, 2012 and screened at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival on November 22, 2012.¹^•² The story follows a doctor investigating the death of an unpopular village resident, a death first blamed on an infectious disease but one for which, as the investigation shows, everybody in the village had a reason.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Guan Hu (管虎), his second collaboration with actor Huang Bo after Cow (2009)¹^•⁶
Release	China, April 28, 2012; Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, November 22, 2012²
Runtime and format	108 minutes, color, Mandarin¹
Main cast	Huang Bo as Niu Jieshi, Simon Yam as Yi Sheng, Alec Su as Dr. Niu, Yu Nan as Widow Ma¹
Awards	2012 Golden Horse Awards: Best Supporting Actress and Best Art Design⁶
Source	Adapted from a novella by Chen Tiejun⁵
Mainland box office	19.07 million yuan as of May 18, 2024⁵

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The film is set in the early 1940s, in the Republican era, in a remote village called the Village of Longevity (Longevity Town) in a Southwestern province of China, a place famed for its residents' long lives.³^•⁴ An epidemic is reported, and a doctor is sent to the village. On the way he finds the villager Niu Jieshi barely alive. The villagers, once hospitable, resist help for Niu and impede the doctor's efforts, and Niu dies of an unknown cause. As the doctor prepares to leave, he discovers a village secret hidden on a cliff and begins to investigate covertly, with the town's mysteries unfolding after he meets a young boy.³

The film's own summary frames the mystery plainly: the violent death of an unpopular village resident is initially blamed on an infectious disease, but the investigation shows that everybody in the village had a reason to murder him.¹ In the account of one scholar, the film tells the story of "a crowd working together to kill someone who refuses to conform."⁴

Niu Jieshi and the village. Niu Jieshi, played by Huang Bo, is regarded as a ruffian by the villagers; his name literally means "as strong as an ox."⁴ His conflicts with the clan stem from its desire to discipline him and his resistance to being disciplined. His transgressions against the rules established by the villagers' ancestors include taking preserved meat without paying, peeping at the painter and mocking him, saving Widow Ma from being drowned as a funeral sacrifice and having sex with her, bathing in the village's "Holy Water," digging treasures from ancestral graves to give as wedding gifts, and scattering "the powder of lust" in the water system, making the entire village fall into frenzy.⁴

The death plan. After several attempts to discipline Niu fail, Dr. Niu, a villager who left to attend medical school, is asked to return and design a death plan. He uses "mass psychological warfare" to deceive Niu Jieshi into believing he has cancer like his father, using the villagers' strange reactions, drinking tricks at a wedding, a celebration ceremony in the rain, and a fabricated chest x-ray as evidence. When Niu Jieshi learns that Dr. Niu is persuading the villagers to force Widow Ma to abort his unborn child, "to eradicate the weed with its root," he decides to die instead, pleading that "the baby is innocent." He drags his blue coffin toward a death spot he has chosen on the mountain, returning everything he took from the villagers along the way, and hears the cries of the newborn as he approaches it.⁴

Production and censorship

The film was produced by companies including Stellar (Beijing) Film Investment and Yunnan Movie Group, with filming beginning on March 18, 2011.⁵ IMDb lists the filming location as Chongqing, China,¹ while Baidu Baike names the Taoping Qiang village in Sichuan as the shooting location.⁵

The script ran into censorship trouble. According to a profile of Guan Hu, the screenplay was rejected once and passed only after submission to the Changchun Film Studio, which raised 21 approval notes.⁸ The ending also changed during editing. Guan Hu had early on shot an ending in which Niu Jieshi took a knife and killed the villagers; in the final cut, Niu gives up his life for his wife and child instead. Huang Bo objected to the change, and Guan Hu brought the actor's pregnant wife to the set, where a scene of listening to a fetus was being filmed, and asked him while he wept at the sound of his own daughter: "Bo'er, do you still want to kill people?"⁸

The English title is a direct translation of the source novella's title, Design of Death (设计死亡), while the Chinese title 杀生 carries a different meaning for the director, who explained: "Sha sheng means not killing."⁷ Sources differ on the novella's exact title: Baidu Baike gives 《儿戏杀人》⁵ while 360 Baike and Sina Entertainment give 《设计死亡》.¹¹^•⁷ The Sino-Cinema review adds that the main titles credit the film as based on a novella called Design of Death 设计死亡, "which doesn't actually exist."⁹

Reception and awards

At the 49th Golden Horse Awards in 2012 the film won Best Supporting Actress and Best Art Design; the festival program also lists nominations for adapted screenplay, cinematography, makeup and costume design, and sound effects.⁶^•¹⁵ The project had earlier been selected in 2009 for the Locarno Festival's Open Doors section as a project proposal.⁶

Commercially the film underperformed. It opened in the May Day holiday window against Hollywood titles Titanic (in 3D) and Battleship, which together took over 1.1 billion yuan, more than 70 percent of the month's box office; in Guangzhou cinemas Design of Death earned 760,000 yuan on the China Film South New Line circuit over the holiday, and industry expectations of 30 million yuan for the film proved too optimistic.¹² Its final mainland total stood at 19.07 million yuan as of May 18, 2024.⁵ Audience ratings have been steadier than its box office: Douban shows 7.8/10 from 268,077 users as of August 29, 2025,⁵ and IMDb lists 6.5/10 from 715 votes.¹

Critical responses divided over its structure. The Golden Horse festival program praised its shifting-person narration and multiple contradictory accounts as pushing the suspense to its peak and exposing "the cruelest, unspoken secret hidden in the national character."⁶ A Senses of Cinema festival report was cooler, calling it another Chinese fable film set on the borderlands and full of peculiar customs, a formula fresh for Fifth Generation directors twenty years earlier but tired by now, and noting that the film begins with its protagonist already dead and then flashes back to explain what happened to him, Rashomon-style but without the substance.¹⁰ Sino-Cinema rated it 6/10, calling it a boisterous black village comedy flawed by a weak structure and lack of a strong central core, while noting that its opening lays out the seeds of the whole story in a mere seven minutes.⁹

Themes and later use

The film has found an afterlife in Chinese medical humanities education. Guo Liping, a Professor of English and Vice Dean at Peking University's School of Health Humanities, suggested that Peking University Health Science Center employ Design of Death in its film-based medical humanities teaching as a way to examine what she terms the "shady" sides of modern medicine: hierarchical structures within the medical establishment, the compulsion to fit in, the endless chase for a longer life (or, more precisely, for postponing death), and the impersonality, emotional distance, and dishonesty of physicians trained in Western medicine. She also reads the film through the Chinese family melodrama tradition, arguing that Niu Jieshi's conflicts with the clan, and his variations from the standard virtuous hero, let the film conform strictly to a discussion of clan ethics; a screening and Q&A with director Guan Hu followed at the center in December 2013.⁴

A Beijing News commentary read the film as a parable about conformity: in a village where "living long" and "following the rules" are the two supreme values, Niu Jieshi is the only spiritually healthy person in a deadened place, and every viewer is invited to recognize that each person could become either Niu Jieshi or one of the silent participants in his murder.¹³ Italian criticism has drawn literary parallels, reading Niu Jieshi as an incarnation of Sun Wukong from Journey to the West, a trickster who disrupts funerals and processions, disregards Confucian rites, and appears nearly indestructible as the villagers' attempts to harm him fail one after another.¹⁴

References

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