The many melodramatic touches would almost certainly have marred my experience of “The Fallen Bridge,” had this mystery thriller been a formulaic Hollywood product. But it’s Chinese — VERY Chinese — and that adds layers of meaning to even mundane details, enriching the film and almost overwhelming even the obvious contrivances.

What director Li Yu and her frequent collaborator, producer and co-writer Fang Li (“Buddha Mountain,” “Lost in Beiing”) give The West is a beautiful, almost almost exotic depiction of Chinese decay and corruption. It’s a grey, rain-drenched tale of a bridge collapse that exposes a murder which unravels wrongdoing that might be reported to the always-two-steps-back police, but would be better dealt with via simple revenge.

Most of the film’s images of Huangque City are grim, bordering on squalid. Ruined apartment blocks, empty power plant cooling towers, trash-littered streets and buildings stained with pollution with a lot of unemployed or underemployed — some of them squatting — and many other locals seemingly over-compensating for that exterior ugliness by over-decorating their flats.

Li Yu uses CCTV footage to set the scene, and capture the collapse of a major bridge in the city. This footage pops up throughout the film, underscoring the place’s unwelcoming appearance — from most every angle — and perhaps jabbing the surveillance state of the world’s most CCTV-crazed countries.

This bridge was almost new. There are victims, and a contractor involved, Zhu Fangzheng (Fan Wei of “Mr. No Problem”) is apologetic, seemingly-outraged at the primary builder and promising victims’ survivors that he and the police will get to the bottom of this.

But as the investigation begins, a body is found, long buried in a bridge pier. It is preserved in concrete, and it is of a long-missing civil engineer on the project. In his pockets, there is a whistle-blower letter about this sloppily-built bridge.

The dead man’s daughter, Xiaoyu (Ma Sichun of “Soulmates”) always assumed Dad had run off with his mistress. That’s what she’d been told as a child by her bitter mother and others. She is summoned from art school, where she is studying to be a sculptress, to identify the body. With the help of the man who raised her after her father’s disappearance, she gathers broken concrete from the site to use for a funerary bust of her late father.

She vows to “kill whoever killed my Dad.” As she knew the man who took care of her as “Uncle Zhu,” we can guess what she quickly comes to conclude. Old, well-connected Uncle Zhu must be implicated in this somehow.

On her quest for The Truth she will be aided by Meng Chao (Karry Wang), a mysterious young squatter, a laborer since childhood who worked on the bridge. He knows something and once he gets her Dad’s long-abandoned motorbike working, he’ll drive Xiaoyu around as they stalk Uncle Zhu and try to piece together the chain of events that killed her father and the people — an ex-mistress and others — who may know something.

The viewer doesn’t have to know young Mr. Wang’s background to guess it. He’s playing a homeless squatter while sporting a 2700 yuan popstar (TFBOYS) haircut.

We get a hint of where this story will reach its climax that’s so obvious it might as well be subtitled “FORESHADOWING.”

The spying young couple have an almost omniscient narrator’s eye-view of attempted shakedowns and suspicious meetings. They visit not just that mistress but a single mom (Chloe Mayaan) with a thing for dressing in red, a cute little girl and information that could incriminate those who need incriminating.

Li Yu tells this story from two points of view, that of the criminals covering their tracks and the young not-quite-couple doggedly following them, and then eventually adds a third — that of the police, who have their suspicions but are slow on the uptake.

As a thriller, “The Fallen Bridge” comes together as we engage with the leads and wonder just how far Xiaoyu will take this. She gets her hands on a dagger, but will she use it? Meng Chao is scripted to be a young man of mystery and chivalrous commitment. The mop-topped pop-star squatter is not letting her do this alone.

Uncle Zhu? He’s superstitious, devoted to folk remedies and given to smoke-cleansing everything, even the vast pile of cash he keeps stashed in one of the city’s many (probably “real estate bubble” pointless) high-rises that he has a hand in.

He’s still delivering godfatherly advice long after Xiaoyu and we grow suspicious of him, trying to throw her off the scent.

“There is an old Chinese saying,” he intones (in Mandarin with English subtitles). “Don’t dwell on the past. Don’t worry about the present. Don’t rush into the future.”

Xiaoyu ignores every line of that, and she has a dagger.

While Li Yu is famous on the film festival circuit for testing China’s notorious censorhip laws, “The Fallen Bridge” plays like one long exercise in pulling one over on them, a film that subtly touches on the generation gap (high youth unemployment as the economy contracts), the building bubble that their elders contrived to cover up the failings of an economy planned and administered pretty much as George Orwell predicted, and the corruption of the One Party state and those who know how to work that system.

The parable here is just what a new generation can and cannot do about all this, as waiting for “the system” to deliver justice when “the system” created the scandals and the decline and decay they foretell is futile. Which is why a dagger might seem like a handy thing to own.

Wonder if the censors missed that?

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ma Sichun, Karry Wang, Chloe Mayaan and Wei Fan

Credits: Directed by Li Yu, scripted by Fang Li and Li Yu. A Cheng Cheng Films release.

Running time: 1:54