The cuckoo in the bourgeois nest has long been a staple of film and drama. Such stories hang around a down-at-heel visitor who shakes up wealthy complacency and alerts smug families to the fragility of their situation. You had that in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. You had it in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. You had a more gung-ho version in Saltburn.
There is, maybe, a little less upending in this excellent Chinese drama, but anyone familiar with the form will have some idea what is to come when Wei (Lin Muran), mildly troubled son to a well-off couple, brings Shuo (Sun Xilun), bright child of an abusive father, home after a misunderstanding at school.
Before too long the parents are warming to a smart teen who has none of their own kid’s addiction to video games and slow-brained loafing. Wei gets some idea of the challenge when he introduces the guest to a coin game and, within minutes, realises his opponent has figured out the trick. What else has the apparent unfortunate figured out? Might Shuo be consciously trying to replace his friend in the family’s nest?
A great deal of the dynamics here are particular to China. I am not qualified to speak on Lin’s treatment of the one-child policy the country implemented up to 2015, but the parents’ enthusiasm for their new charge is certainly connected to that imposition. Western viewers will enjoy the icy perfection the director has created for his strikingly comfortable characters. The interiors are spotless but less brutal than such satires often allow. We get a brief scene of semi-formal tea service, but we also get a fair bit of JS Bach. This is an agreeable cage in which to contemplate loss of soul.
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Throughout we get reminders that we are studying the characters and the characters are studying each other. There is barely a close-up in the first hour – as if we were watching through a one-way mirror – and, later on, shots of the father examining microbes are intercut with Shuo learning from his hosts.
The film does not quite pull off its enigmatic ending, but this remains a startlingly eerie debut that finds new angles to a familiar genre.
Brief History of a Family is in cinemas from March 22nd
