Adapted from a best-selling book by Lei Mi, Xu Jizhou’s The Liquidator follows Fang Mu (Deng Chao) is a brilliant forensic psychologist (already played last summer by Li Yifeng in Xie Dongshen’s Guilty of Mind) assisting detective Mi Nan (Cecilia Liu) in tracking down a serial killer who calls himself “the Light of the City”, and targets people who have been the subject of public ire: a harsh teacher who inadvertently pushed one his students to suicide, an unscrupulous lawyer who helped frame an innocent woman… Channeling public opinion through the social networks, the killer even goes so far as to live-stream an execution, and let netizens decide if the victim should be spared or murdered. But Fang doesn’t yet realize that the murders are connected to an event from his own past, and that a former schoolmate of his, Jiang Ya (Ethan Juan), may be none other than the “Light of the City”.

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