Jianjie Lin’s Brief History of a Family is an immaculate sculpture, one of those art-film thrillers in which every element of every frame is under profound control. There’s no stray detail here, no spontaneous behavioral business for the audience to discover for itself.
The risk of this sort of film is lifelessness, as in any number of thrillers released each year by A24. But the potential benefit is a heightened suspense achieved by our implicit understanding that the filmmakers have the means and ability to do whatever they please. You’re in their hands, and they could be ready to work you over. Lin achieves and sustains this tension, as his eerie, underpopulated frames and pregnant foreshadowing create an understated unease.
Brief History of a Family opens with a medium shot of a teenage boy, Yan Shuo (Xilun Sun), attempting to do pull-ups on a playground. Shuo is framed in the center of the image with his back to the audience, in such a manner as to tickle the eye with its symmetry and underscore awareness of the potential menaces that could exist outside of the image’s periphery. There’s a metaphorical resonance to the image as well, as we will come to know Shuo as a boy hanging by a thread, with a fraught life governed by an unstable, alcoholic father. Or so he says.
A basketball hits Shuo in the head, knocking him to the ground where he hurts his leg. A boy about his age, Tu Wei (Muran Lin), comes to help Shuo, and they become fast—well, “friends” doesn’t do justice to the ambiguity of their relationship. They form an intense yet distanced and competitive acquaintanceship that’s familiar of young people. For his part, Wei, who was the person who hurt Shuo to begin with, seems to resent the other boy immediately, while Shuo is more interested in earning the esteem of Wei’s father (Feng Zu) and mother (Ke-Yu Guo).
Soon, Shuo is popping on over to Wei’s house to see Wei’s parents, under the pretense that he’s waiting for Wei. The family’s house is a pristine apartment suggestive of upper-middle class comfort, and cinematographer Jiahao Zhang’s images emphasize its lonely, icy spaciousness. In this bougie habitat, Shuo is frequently framed as an “other,” in silhouette or behind glass. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence utilized similar images to establish a boy’s neediness as both poignant and chilling, suggesting an emotional bill that adults may be unwilling to pay.
Thriller conventions condition us to expect a situation in which Shuo manipulates Wei’s family in the service of an endgame that will remain a mystery until the third act of Brief History of a Family, a suspicion that’s encouraged by the fact that Shuo is only defined by his relationship to the Wei family. We never see him with this alcoholic father, or even in his home at all. You may wonder if you’re watching a domestic drama or a thriller or a mutation of the two.
Lin’s script pulls a fast one on us, subverting expectations and ratcheting tension up further: Wei’s parents like Shuo and accept him into their family with a readiness that insults Wei. The intruder adjusts to his new habitat all too well, and the hammer doesn’t fall as you may expect.
A courteous, intellectually curious model student with a striver’s mentality, Shuo embodies the qualifies that Wei’s parents would love to see in their sullen, listless, video-game-addicted child. In an early exchange at the Tu dinner table, Wei says that it’s weird that Shuo always has his head in books. Indeed, Shuo is creepy in his impersonal obsequiousness, but Wei plays the wrong card with his father, who says that there’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to better themselves. The father is taking an open shot at the son, one that Wei doesn’t or is unwilling to discern. In cinema, the mothers are often the voices of reason in such dust-ups between fathers and sons, but Wei’s mother seems every bit as enthralled with Shuo as his father.
The film continues to shift gears, almost subliminally. Shuo’s eagerness gradually becomes appealing, for a stretch, especially his relationship with Wei’s father, a medical professional who scans as someone who pulled himself above his initial station as well. By contrast, Wei suggests a stereotypical teenager, who can prompt feelings that are forbidden to admit. As in, parents may at their weakest moments feel stuck with a plodding, ungrateful mistake.
China’s one-child policy brings this resentment into starker relief. What if the only child you get is an annoying dullard? Wei’s father wants his son to learn English so that he may study abroad and kickstart his ambition, and so Shuo learns English in Wei’s place. In an especially uncomfortable, bitterly funny chain of events, Shuo evens goes on a family vacation in place of Wei, when Wei’s father plays one of the boy’s lies against him, calling Wei’s bluff.
The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions—between group and personal needs—that can cast a pall over family life. Not only the Tu family, or Chinese families, but families in general. Lin particularizes an old adage—that you can’t choose your family—with the suggestion that the Chinese premium on ambition and upward mobility can turbo-charge festering estrangements. Brief History of a Family takes the world’s relentless addiction to self-actualization to one of its darkest implications then: Why let anything, including children, interfere with the pursuit of your best life? And what if the children are okay with that?
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