By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on June 22, 2024)

Writer-director Qui Yang’s character study focuses on a middle-class family in crisis. While waiting in a school gym to pick up her daughter, Cai (Yu Aier) is hit by a stray ball. Preoccupied, she reflexively hurls it back in the direction it came from, unintentionally injuring a elderly woman (off-camera). The incident triggers an existential malaise already long-percolating due to her imminent plans to file divorce papers against her husband (who is trying to talk her out of it) and her increasingly strained relationship with her uncommunicative daughter.

A setup very much in the vein of Diary of a Mad Housewife, but unfortunately not in the same league. Overall glacial pacing is not helped by the murky cinematography-which makes it frustratingly difficult to read the actor’s faces (the dialog is minimal; so how can the audience connect with any of the characters when it looks like everything was filmed with a hidden camera?).