Review | Sundance 2024: Brief History of a Family – Chinese drama exposing tensions in a ‘perfect’ post-one-child-policy family is impersonal and unsettling
- Zu Feng plays a middle-class dad in post-one-child-policy China whose son’s friend Shuo inserts himself into the family of three and exposes hidden tensions
- Is Shuo the son they always wanted? Similar in ways to the 2023 psychological thriller Saltburn, Lin Jianjie’s understated drama leaves viewers feeling uneasy
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3.5/5 stars
Premiering in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition strand at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the United States, Brief History of a Family is an elusive drama set in modern-day China.
The feature film debut of writer-director Lin Jianjie, it begins as a young boy, Shuo (Sun Xilun), is lifting himself on parallel bars in his schoolyard when a basketball thuds into his back, causing him to fall. The perpetrator is Wei (Lin Muran), son of Mr. Tu (Zu Feng), a biologist, and his wife (Guo Keyu), a former flight attendant.
Like the not-so-subtle shots of cells squirming on glass slides that are frequently glimpsed, Wei’s family will be examined under the microscope after the apologetic Wei invites Shuo home to play video games.
In a story that is set in a China long past the one-child-policy era, Wei’s mother and father are living with regrets about past actions and Shuo seems to shake them both. His own mother died when he was 10, and he now lives with his father, a drunk who beats him.
“If only it was him who died, not my mother,” he confides to Wei.
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As time goes on, Shuo’s arrival splinters the facade of this seemingly perfect family living in their plush apartment block. Wei’s father admires Shuo’s studious nature, especially as his own son appears to be slacking at school.
All Wei wants to do is join the city fencing team and he is forever rocked by his father’s constant criticism (he even dubs him “Voldemort” after Harry Potter’s nemesis). Meanwhile, his mother is clearly drawn to the softly spoken Shuo thanks to emotional absences in her life.
Is Shuo the son they have always wanted? Gradually, the more he inserts himself into the family, the more Wei feels pushed away.
The film bears some comparison to British actress-director Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which also features an interloper penetrating the confines of a well-to-do family. And director Lin does tip the film in a similar direction during an increasingly strange final act that gives us dream sequences and moments of bloody retribution.
There are moments of real subtlety sewn into the fabric – notably a shot of a 16th birthday cake that we assume belongs to Wei. The performances are rightly understated too, with Lin also smartly capturing the glistening urban backdrops – everything has a cold, impersonal sheen.
Even if the finale, rather than reaching for an emotional crescendo, is low-key, Brief History of a Family is a film that leaves viewers with a disquieting feeling as the credits roll.
