Sundance 2024 Review: BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY, Trenchant, Perceptive Character Study

The outsized demands inherent in familial expectations can weigh heavily on children.

It’s all the heavier when those expectations fall on the shoulders of a child born and raised without siblings. That’s compounded even further when authoritarian governments strictly limit the number of children, as China did with its now-defunct one-child policy.

Every expectation, from academics to sports and personal relationships to professional ones, can become the subject of intense, often withering discussion and analysis. For that child, failure can lead to disappointment, despondency, or something far worse if neglected.

Set in the aftermath of China’s one-child policy, Brief History of a Family, writer-director Jianjie Lin’s deeply incisive, provocative feature-length debut, centers, in part, on Tu Wei (Muran Lin), a sullen, introspective high-schooler who prefers videogames and after-school sports, specifically fencing, over the academic pursuits and high achievements of his upper-middle-class, middle-aged mother and father (Ke-Yu Guo and Feng Zu, respectively).

Between his ex-flight attendant turned perpetually anxious mother and his financially successful father, a trained biologist who works for a medical equipment company, Tu Wei feels the ocean-deep crush of those expectations with every interaction, word, or combination thereof of his parents.

That character study of over-achieving parents and their underachieving son, however, doesn’t provide Brief History of a Family with the obligatory narrative momentum. The role of narrative catalyst falls on Yan Shuo (Xilun Sun), one of Tu Wei’s classmates. Shy, introspective, and almost always alone, Yan Shuo seems to represent Tu Wei’s mirror image: he prefers academics to sports, and when he meets Tu Wei’s parents, the result of an incident that Jianjie Lin leaves deliberately unclear, his classmate’s parents to his own (a never-seen abusive, alcoholic father) stand in sharp contrast. 

Taking more than a page from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley novels and their countless derivative offshoots, Jianjie Lin gradually shifts the focus from Tu Wei and Yan Shuo’s burgeoning relationship to Yan Shuo’s seemingly deliberate insinuation into the good graces of Tu Wei’s parents.

As Yan Shuo slowly reveals key elements of his backstory, one traumatic incident at a time, Tu Wei’s parents naturally respond with a combination of pity, sympathy, and empathy. Jianjie Lin leaves the nature of Yan Shuo’s intentions deliberately unclear, but there’s little doubt that Tu Wei’s parents begin to see Yan Shuo as the potentially high-achieving alternate son they never had and never will.  

That Yan Shuo seems to prefer their company over his age-appropriate classmate doesn’t raise any initial red flags, though it probably would (and should) in the real world. By the time Tu Wei understands the existential threat Yan Shuo represents, it might be too late.

Jianjie Lin repeatedly undermines audience expectations, suggesting Brief History of a Family will slip into pulp-suspense territory one moment and a subtle, if no less obvious, social critique of modern China’s class structure the next, and then back again before one scene ends and the next one begins.

Storytelling-wise, Jianjie Lin takes a calculated, clinical approach — complemented by Jiahao Zhang’s stunningly realized, vibrant cinematography — filled with startling geometric compositions, clean, antiseptic surfaces, and the accouterments of a well-ordered, upper-middle-class life (e.g., gleamingly new apartment, furniture, copious amounts of fresh food).

Ultimately, it’s all of a piece, characters, performers, and visuals working harmoniously together to tell a decidedly unharmonious story of a peculiar kind of home invasion, simultaneously universal to the parental experience and particular to the post-one-child policy in China.

Brief History of a Family premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.