A hired killer discovers that the fantasy novel he has been sent to stop might be steering events in the real world in A Writer's Odyssey, a 2021 genre-bending adventure from China.
What is A Writer's Odyssey about?
Guan Ning takes on a job from a shadowy backer named Tu Ling: track down and kill a novelist named Kongwen Lu before he can finish his latest fantasy series. That series follows a teenage hero, also called Kongwen, on a quest to bring down the tyrant Lord Redmane with guidance from a mysterious Black Armor. As Guan Ning gets closer to his target, the line between the novel's invented battles and events unfolding around him starts to blur, turning a straightforward contract into something stranger and far more personal, tangled up with the fate of his own missing daughter.
About the cast
Lei Jiayin plays Guan Ning, the reluctant hitman at the center of the story, opposite Dong Zijian as the novelist he is sent to find. Yang Mi and Tong Liya appear in the cast alongside Yu Hewei, Guo Jingfei and Dong Jie, rounding out a large ensemble split between the real-world plot and the fantasy world it echoes.
Context & significance
Director Lu Yang builds the film around two parallel stories, one grounded in a present-day hunt for a writer and the other an elaborate fantasy quest lifted straight from the pages of that writer's novel. Sweeping action sequences, sprawling visual effects and a plot that keeps folding one world into the other give the film a scale closer to epic fantasy than a conventional thriller, spanning genres from adventure and mystery to crime and science fiction inside a single 130-minute runtime. It is adapted from a serialized Chinese web novel, a format built on exactly this kind of layered, multi-book storytelling.
Watching A Writer's Odyssey on Ktime
A Writer's Odyssey is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so viewers can pick whichever suits them. The page is free to read, and watching the film only requires signing into a K-Time account; the platform's Farsi-language interface makes titles like this easy to find for Persian-speaking audiences wherever they are.