Brief History of a Family review – mysterious interloper at centre of exquisitely constructed drama

Lin Jianjie’s remarkable debut feature keeps you guessing to the final scene – a thrilling film directed and performed immaculately

This knockout debut feature from Chinese writer-director Lin Jianjie is like some kind of cinematic kinetic mobile, such as the ones artist Alexander Calder designed in the last century; it’s so exquisitely balanced that it’s able to keep reconfiguring itself with the merest breeze into a whole new arrangement of shapes that’s just as pleasing and abstract as the last. Precision and random chance, freestyle inspiration and formal craft are all in constant play here. That perfectly complements the story itself, a parable about a tricky space – the family unit – where talent, ambition and the lottery of genetics and luck all dance around one another, held in place by gravity and desire. It really is that good, and well-worth seeing in a cinema, not just on a small screen at home, so as to appreciate Zhang Jiahao’s sculptural cinematography and the sparse palette of composer Toke Brorson Odin’s score.

The story takes place in an unnamed Chinese city; outside, we see glimpses of Chengdu, Hangzhou and Beijing, but most of the action is inside a tastefully appointed flat, all glassy surfaces and privacy screens made of stylised foliage. This is where 15-year-old Tu Wei (Lin Muran) lives with his upper-middle-class parents who are never named. Dad is a highly regarded biological scientist (Zu Feng), and mum (Guo Ke-Yu) a former flight attendant, which means her language skills allowed her to travel.

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