Dream: The Brewery Murder Mystery Where a Reporter's Old Footage Is the Evidence

Why this one

Dream (醉梦, Zui Meng) arrives on Tencent Video on October 16, and it asks a reporter to carry the case. Shen Leshui (沈乐水), played by Liu Shishi (刘诗诗), once filmed the workers of a brewery for a documentary. Years later people connected to that factory start dying, and the footage she shot, including what never made the final cut, becomes the way back into an old death.

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Two things set it apart from a standard murder-of-the-week story. The camera is part of the plot: the production describes old film and video as testimony, not as flashbacks. And the setting is a state-run brewery around the turn of the millennium, a period of factory restructuring that Chinese crime dramas have turned to again and again.

A note on timing: this guide is written on premiere day, from official material only. It describes the set-up and the production, not any episode.

The setup

In the official synopsis, the Songjiang Brewery (老松江啤酒厂) in the city of La City (拉城) was once the pride of the town. Shen Leshui recorded the daily lives of its workers with a documentary camera. The brewery declined, and years later it becomes the stage for a string of killings. Haunting all of it is the death of a woman worker, Liu Xuemei (刘雪梅), played by Li Qin (李沁). Her death is tied to a conspiracy of ambition and greed, and the case was closed quickly, according to The Paper (澎湃新闻), the Shanghai outlet.

The present-day case is a series of murders around the abandoned brewery. Shen Leshui returns to her hometown with tapes that never reached the finished film. She works alongside a young detective, Gao Xuelin (高雪林), played by Hu Xianxu (胡先煦), and the two begin as an uneasy pair, a reporter and a police officer each holding half the file. HK01 reports that the story spans about sixteen years between the old death and the new murders, while China News says only "over a decade" for the brewery's rise and fall. We use the looser figure.

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Cast and crew

• Liu Shishi (刘诗诗) as Shen Leshui, a reporter and documentary maker

• Hu Xianxu (胡先煦) as Gao Xuelin, a young police officer

• Li Naiwen (李乃文) as Zhao Haipeng (赵海鹏), a man who knows how the factory was run and divided up, according to HK01

• Li Qin (李沁) as Liu Xuemei, the dead woman worker, billed as a guest lead

• Huang Xiaolei (黄小蕾), the fourth billed lead

Yang Yang (杨阳) directs and co-wrote the script with Jia Dongyan (贾东岩) and Zhao Zibo (赵梓博). China News lists Yang's earlier crime work as Bu Wan Mei Shou Hai Ren (不完美受害人) and Yin Shen De Ming Zi (隐身的名字) and credits Jia with Lie Zui Tu Jian (猎罪图鉴) and Feng Sheng (风声). Yang also directed the period romance A Dream of Splendor (梦华录). Tencent Video produced the series, with Golden Media (金色传媒) and Lingyuan Culture (灵渊文化), according to Beijing News (新京报).

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Liu Shishi out of costume

For many overseas viewers Liu Shishi is a period-drama name: Ruoxi in Scarlet Heart (步步惊心), the 2011 time-travel romance that was a hit in and beyond China, and later The Imperial Doctress (女医·明妃传). Reports describe Dream as her first modern crime mystery.

The look is the clearest signal. Official stills and the trailer show her with short hair, little make-up and an old camera on her shoulder, and The Paper describes the character as someone who hauls equipment and digs through archives rather than a glamorous heroine. Whether the performance holds is for the episodes to show.

Three timelines, one camera

The production calls its structure 2.5 shikong (2.5时空, "2.5 time-spaces"): the present-day hunt for the killer, the millennium past, and the footage from Shen Leshui's documentary, titled Mai Ya Guo (麦芽国, "Malt Country"), which sits between the two. Official material says the footage is not a decorative flashback but the key, with the past hiding "foreshadowing" for today and today rewriting how the past is read.

For a viewer, this is a way of reading the show: expect scenes that are played as drama, and scenes that are played as rough video, and expect the second kind to matter. The premiere posters are built on a beer-green palette, with a street lamp's warm light picking out the main characters, according to China News.

The brewery at the turn of the millennium

China News and Beijing News both say the series is set against the enterprise reform of the millennium years. In plain terms, many state-owned factories in China were restructured, sold or closed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and workers lost their jobs. The brewery in Dream stands for that moment, and the series follows how the people around it fared over the following decade or so.

Overseas viewers may think of The Long Season (漫长的季节), a murder mystery set in a fictional factory town in financial trouble and mass layoffs, told across interwoven timelines. Dream appears to work in related territory, with its own device of reporter and tape. Official material describes the characters as ordinary people with secrets and weak points who support one another and also calculate against one another under pressure, and says the series avoids good-and-evil labels. Whether it keeps that promise is for the episodes to show.

Where to watch

Dream premieres exclusively on Tencent Video on October 16 at 18:00 China time, in its X Theater (X剧场) slot, a slot Tencent has used for mystery and suspense series. The series has 16 episodes, according to The Paper and HK01; the film database TMDB lists 18, which we treat as an error. HK01 reports daily updates at 18:00, three episodes on the first day, and one extra early episode for top-tier subscribers.

China News reports that the show will also stream worldwide on WeTV and on YouTube at the same time as its Chinese release. We could not confirm this on the platform pages, so check WeTV in your region. The official English title in databases is simply Dream.