China Sea

Mixed martial arts fighting has been having a moment onscreen this year. It was given the US fighter-on-the-outs treatment in Benny Safdie’s Dwayne Johnson-starrer The Smashing Machine. Now Lithuanian director Jurgis Matulevičius, inspired by the true tragic story of an MMA fighter who was ‘cancelled’, and working from a script from Saule Bliuvaite, the award-winning writer/director of Toxic, gives a tale of being washed-up a bleakly hard boiled and distinctive eastern European tang.

Osvald Gurevicius (Marius Rapsys) makes a living from violence. He’s an MMA fighter who we see downing an opponent in seconds in scratchy TV footage at the start of China Sea. Unfortunately, violence is also a regular element of Osvald’s everyday life and when he accidentally hits and injures a woman in the middle of a bar fight, the repercussions for his career are like a swift kick to his solar plexus.

By not showing this specific act onscreen, Matulevičius helps us to keep a focus on Osvald himself and his evident attempts to ‘reform’, although a key scene involving a dip in an icy lake allows him to show just how unpredictable Osvald's energy can be when it escapes. Living in a spare room at his friend Ju-Long’s (Jag Huang) restaurant – the China Sea of the title – Osvald attends anger management classes and coaches at the gym where he used to be the big name. Taiwanese emigre Ju-Long is also a man whose weakness has brought him low – a gambling addiction that means he has had to adopt an unpleasant blackmarket sideline that preys on his own community.

These men are essentially doubling down on their own marginalisation, with Osvald, as a Lithuanian, living on the fringes of Ju-Long’s already marginalised Taiwanese family, while Ju-Long is further marginalising himself by his nefarious dealings. Pushing back into what might be considered ‘normal’ society from these spaces is shown to be pretty much impossible, like the restaurant fish that Osvald can’t resist releasing back into the sea, you wonder whether he and Ju-Long could even stay afloat in the mainstream.

Matulevičius’ film unfolds in fragments, almost as though they are ‘rounds’ in Osvald and Ju-Long’s life-long fight – a decision that works well as a metaphor but doesn’t always work to the film’s advantage on a narrative level. Weaving in and out is Skaiste (Severija Janusauskaite, conveying a world of emotion with every glance), who Osvald encounters at his anger management sessions and begins to fall for, despite her being a squeeze of a mob boss billed simply as Tourist (Vaidotas Martinaitis). If an American or British filmmaker had Tourist in the film, chances are he’d be seen square in the frame spitting expletives or meting out death. China Sea, however, keeps him at arm’s length, which makes him feel all the more shadowy. The Tourist name is also apt, since he is a Russian incomer who may be just passing through the lives of the others but who makes his presence felt.

In addition to seeing Osvald try to realise the small-time dream of bettering himself, we are also privy to one of his actual dreams, from which he tells his Ju-Long, “I wake up as if I’m a dead man”. This sense of futility despite effort is a thread that links strongly to Matulevičius previous Oscar-nominated Isaac in which the past and the present had a circularity. Escaping from the traps you have constructed for yourself when you have the background and life experience of Osvald and Ju-Long is shown to be nigh on impossible, especially when the punches come from unexpected places and simply do not stop.

Reviewed on: 20 Nov 2025