Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) is a Hong Kong-Chinese historical action mystery you can watch online on iFILM. Director Tsui Hark cast Andy Lau as Tang-dynasty detective Di Renjie in a 122-minute spectacle built around one very strange crime.

The year is 690 AD. Empress Wu Zetian — about to become China's first female ruler — is overseeing the construction of a towering Buddhist statue in the capital Luoyang when courtiers start spontaneously combusting in public. No fire source, no explanation. The empress releases Di Renjie from the prison where she herself had sent him years earlier for opposing her rise to power. He investigates alongside a palace guard and one of Wu's own advisors, neither of whom fully trusts the other.

Tsui Hark fills the frame with underground cities, mechanical beasts, and poisons that defy the era's science — historical plausibility is not the point, spectacle is. Andy Lau and Tony Leung Ka-fai make a sharp double act. For fans of Chinese period cinema with genuine production scale, this one delivers. Stream Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame online on iFILM.