A Chinese Family Adds One in Tense Psychological Thriller Brief History of a Family

A Single White Female for the end of China’s single-child policy, Brief History of a Family is a crisp and tensely framed psychological thriller debut from writer/director Jianjie Lin. Immersed in the fraught class and cultural dynamics of urban China, the story of a family slowly succumbing  to the (possibly) sinister affections of their son’s quiet classmate is an infectious good time. Crafted with such delightful suspense that you can’t help but smile as you squirm, Brief History of a Family pulls from plenty of genre influences (its have/have-not friction and affluent apartment confines will be familiar to Parasite fans) to construct a tight dramatic metaphor encompassing Chinese parenting values and the end of a sociopolitical era.

At the heart of Brief History of a Family is the pulsing disappointment of difference. Shuo (Xilun Sun) is quiet, bookish, serious—a kid who gets bullied. Wei (Muran Lin), in his oversized hoodies and Beats-like headphones pumping Brit-hop into his ears, isn’t an academic all-star. He’s a little more Western, a little more visibly wealthy, a little more likely to lash out at those who have the qualities his more traditional family might appreciate. But when Wei bops Shuo in the head with a basketball, an injury-causing meet-cute between unlikely friends, it’s not that hard to believe. They both seem like outsiders, in their own way. Wei hurries Shuo over to his house for after-school gaming, which is where Shuo sees opportunity.

Wei’s apartment, pointedly a decent bike ride away from school—and over a conspicuous bridge as clear an architectural barrier as train tracks—has the smell of new money. It’s spotless, sharply angled, filled with glass. A floor-to-ceiling window backdrops the clean lines, classy whites and understated technology of the home. A transparent dividing wall splits the living room in two, masking a dining area with ostentatious opacity. Shuo as a character isn’t given to expressing…well, anything, really, but there’s an obvious sense of awe to the environmental shift.

This awe is only heightened when Wei’s parents (played by Feng Zu and Keyu Guo) arrive, taking in their son’s odd friend with an apprehension soon melted by his sob stories and sycophancy. Shuo knows how to weaponize his misfortune, and middle-class guilt is the perfect target. Lin’s knowingly structured script never hides its intentions, reveling in the tension to an almost amusing degree, while his crisp and ominous camera makes every innocuous sequence an exercise in everyday eeriness. 

Shot by cinematographer Jiahao Zhang, Brief History of a Family loves to isolate its actors in the austere apartment. Always a little too far away, and with the lighting just a little reminiscent of a horror movie, the microscope metaphor running through the film—present in the dad’s biotech profession, the kids’ science class, and in severe iris shots that zoom in on the family like they’re a cellular unit—tells us more about the filmmaker than the film. Lin looks at his characters as component parts in an experiment, pushing each variable to their outer limits to see how the rest react.

The performers playing the parents are most skilled at adapting to these developments, hiding their characters’ own secrets with quiet unease and accepting the fawning at their feet with not-so-reluctant pleasure. Why wouldn’t they want a second chance at parenthood, with a kid who actively appreciates all the things their firstborn resents, or takes for granted? It’s an insightful bit of commentary about parental desire, especially in the context of the high expectations and government-mandated restrictions of China. The kids, though, are where you can feel this absence of humanity. Their scenes together are almost always silent, with them just staring at each other, not saying anything even when they converse. It’s unsettling, sure, but as Brief History of a Family develops along its questionably devious dealings, we get little sense of what Wei and Shuo think of each other—even if it’s easy to extrapolate their feelings about the situation in general.

On top of the brisk and tight construction of this thriller (Brief History of a Family is certainly what it claims to be, clocking in at less than 100 minutes), Lin throws a few bold, dreamy sequences at us for good measure. They don’t ever derail the family infiltration at hand, but they do feel like they belong to a different movie—sometimes invigorating, sometimes distracting. The glut of the film is quotidian: Studying, shopping, dining. That Lin can push each of these to the fist-clenching edge is a testament to his directorial prowess. That we stay hooked, believing in his intense narrative until its bittersweet end, reflects our subconscious knowledge of how easily our own carefully encapsulated lives could be thrown out of whack. Brief History of a Family pushes and pulls us between conflicting desires, between traditional values and Western influence, between poverty and wealth, between disappointment and people-pleasing, with a scientific precision and an amusement park’s sense of fun.

Director: Jianjie Lin
Writer: Jianjie Lin
Starring: Feng Zu, Keyu Guo, Xilun Sun, Muran Lin
Release Date: January 19, 2024 (Sundance)

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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