Your home is meant to be your safe space. The place to go when you need and want to unwind after a day of navigating through the various molds society shoves us all into every day. But what happens behind the closed doors of our homes, our hearts, and our minds, once there is a new, completely unknown element introduced?
This year’s Sundance Film Festival has had a field day shining lights on different layers of introspection. Perhaps none so far that I have seen has been as sinister, though, as writer/director Jianjie Lin’s debut feature BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY. In post-single child policy China, Wei Tu (Muran Lin) meets Yan Shuo (Xilun Sun) following an accident. Wei offers to help get Shuo to the nurse, and soon the boys start hanging out after school. Shuo at first seems intimidated by Wei’s house and lifestyle—comparatively the Tu family is infinitely more well off and together than Shuo and his abusive father—but soon ingratiates himself into the family unit. Wei’s mother (Ke-Yu Guo) and father (Feng Zu) at first take pity on Shuo, but then come to find themselves caring for him, and even showing preference for him and his abilities over their own son, who it seems they perceive to be a slacker who puts no real thought into his future.
There is tension from the start of BRIEF HISTORY, crafted thanks in no small part to the cinematography (by Jiahao Zhao) and sound design (by Margot Testemale and Jacques Pedersen). The two frequently come together in an intricate dance that acts to fill in the blanks of some of the story. The opening scene, in which Shuo is seemingly performing some kind of endurance test with himself to see how long he can hold to the bar without dropping and collapses after being hit in the back of the head with a basketball, is but the first in a series of spurts of violence throughout the film. A later return to that scene reveals that it did more to set up the entire film’s dynamic in two minutes than any viewer realizes at first blush.
Muran Lin and Xilun Sun’s performances as Wei and Shuo are electric. Their chemistry and intensity carries the tense undercurrent of the film all the way through the closing shot. They are two opposing sides of the same coin, and it frequently feels as though they are playing an intricate mind game between the two of them in which Wei’s parents are but collateral fodder, pawns on a board set by the boys. As their game escalates and they grow closer, it begins to feel like there’s a storm brewing under the surface that no one involved is quite prepared to watch release. But, Shuo’s presence does far more than simply highlight the distinctions between himself and Wei in Wei’s parents’ eyes. The longer he’s there, sliding into the family dynamic like an eel, the more secrets come to the forefront between Mr. and Mrs. Tu. There’s a hurt at their core that neither has quite been able to forget, and while they try to use Suho to heal it, it becomes clear enough as the film progresses that he is infinitely better at exacerbating pain, hunting raw spots to exploit even when he himself is hurting.
BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY is an intricately woven web of a film, in which every creative aspect must and does come together to remarkable effect in order to convey the depth of feeling at the heart of the story. We are not, really, given many details about Shuo beyond what he offers the Tu family. And it quickly becomes apparent there is something far more sinister below every surface of the film than meets our eye. BRIEF HISTORY is just as much a sensory experience as it is a puzzle, a full visual and auditory feast to explore as it crawls under your skin.
BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY played at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Tags: Brief History of A Family, Feng Zu, Foreign Films, Jacques Pedersen, Jiahao Zhao, Jianjie Lin, Ke-Yu Guo, Margot Testemale, Muran Lin, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival 2024, Xilun Sun
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