Released back in 1979, The System is a key motion picture of Hong Kong’s so-called “New Wave” of cinema. Thanks to a new restoration by the M+ art museum it can be seen in a likely better condition than anybody has seen it before. It is an illuminating element of the region’s film history, and an outstanding crime thriller to boot.

The New Wave was largely defined by an influx of fresh young directors to the Hong Kong film industry. They generally boasted Western educations and were palpably more inspired by foreign cinema styles than the films of Hong Kong itself. At the same time movie-going was enjoying a popular Renaissance in the territory, ensuring eager audiences for all manner of new and innovative filmmaking.

The System is written and directed by former news photographer Peter Yung Wai-chuen, and represents a sharp diversion from both the Shaw Brothers-dominated cinema of the 1970s and the ‘heroic bloodshed’ action cinema that would come to typify the 1980s. Instead it draws heavily on 1970s American crime films such as Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and Shear’s Across 110th Street (1972). It is a much blunter, more cynical work than one might expect. It is gritty in tone and direct in approach, and attempts a more realistic depiction of Hong Kong crime than its contemporaries. The importation of heroin from the Chinese mainland is a major social problem. The triads run that importation, while the police force – a combination of Chinese detectives and English supervisors – is riddled with corruption and rife with moles and informants.

Yung approaches the situation simultaneously from both angles, tracking both the criminal enterprise and the police operation intended to dismantle it. Those angles are personified by dual protagonists. Chan (Pai Ying) leads a dedicated narcotics squad tasked with tracking the path of the smuggled drugs from their entry to Hong Kong to the handover to the syndicates. A team of young plainclothes officers reports directly to him, and some of the film’s best sequences relate their process of tailing unsuspecting criminals across the city.

To better achieve his goals, Chan arrests and blackmails mid-level dealer Tam (Sek Kin) into operating as his informant. Once their shaky partnership is established, it sets The System off on a path of criss-crossed ambitions, betrayal, and misunderstanding. It is a comparatively brief work, running under 90 minutes, but it comes packed with incident and a steadily-building tension. Its deliberately messy mixture of cops and robbers foreshadows the great 2002 thriller Infernal Affairs, and were I to learn it had directly inspired that film I would not be in the least bit surprised.

The performances are strong and naturalistic. The tone and aesthetic are both matter-of-fact and rough-hewn. The characters are well-developed and wonderfully ambivalent. With a restored release, international audiences have the best possible chance to discover and fully appreciate this Hong Kong mini-masterpiece.