TIFF ’25: The Sun Rises on Us All + Obsession

日掛中天
***½/****
starring Zhilei Xin, Songwen Zhang, Shaofeng Feng
written by Shangjun Cai, Nianjin Han
directed by Shangjun Cai

OBSESSION
***/****
starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
written and directed by Curry Barker

by Bill Chambers In Shangjun Cai’s masterful The Sun Rises on Us All, Meiyun (Zhilei Xin, deservedly feted at the recent Venice Film Festival) is a wannabe influencer who sells dropship clothing out of a crappy little outlet in a Guangzhou mall. Newly pregnant by her married boyfriend Qifeng (Shaofeng Feng), she’s a woman in her late thirties with the lifestyle of someone considerably younger, suggesting an interruption in the past that will soon be confirmed. While at the hospital for a prenatal checkup, Meiyun spots a man she recognizes, Baoshu (Songwen Zhang), who’s recovering from gastrointestinal surgery after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. There is palpable tension between them, but Meiyun cares about him, and as he needs somewhere to convalesce, she makes room for his dour ass in her cramped one-bedroom. He’s such an unpleasant guest that it’s easy to feel sorry for Meiyun, whose romance with Qifeng is complicated enough. Indeed, you could go so far as to call Baoshu and Meiyun’s on-screen dynamic S&M, although it’s not always him doing the S and her doing the M. (When Baoshu goes on a mini-hunger strike, for instance, Meiyun literally slaps sense into him.) But as the details of their shared history come to light, our sympathies begin to shift–or, more to the point, even out.

Meiyun and Baoshu are exes. Late one night, they were driving home and hit someone with their car. Baoshu was charged with vehicular manslaughter and served a three-year prison sentence. Meiyun didn’t wait for him. Baoshu summarizes this official version of the events for Qifeng while Meiyun is within earshot, a passive-aggressive masterstroke that drives Meiyun out into the street–out of her skin, if it could. Baoshu’s subsequent reflections on this dark chapter in their lives paint a much more ethically complex portrait of the accident and its aftermath while building the twists and turns into the film you’d expect from Cai–“a leading voice in Chinese neo-noir,” per the TIFF guide–without compromising a serious-minded and almost plotless overarching narrative that feels like an arthouse throwback in the most nostalgic way. By the same token, there’s an unabashed frisson to certain story beats–buried crimes, extortion, a heroine who meets the definition of a femme fatale–that are obviously in Cai’s lexicon. A devastating adult drama, The Sun Rises on Us All is also a uniquely pulpy one.

Baoshu’s confessional monologues may seem at odds with how monosyllabic he is the rest of the time, but this aspect of the film struck me as Bergmanesque, down to the sickliest character pontificating the most. Like archetypal Bergman protagonists, Baoshu and Meiyun compulsively pick at old wounds, though Cai eschews the hermetic seal of the extreme closeup because, unlike archetypal Bergman protagonists, they don’t live in a bubble. Or, at least, they’re isolated not by nature and privilege, but by urban indifference. They have problems that won’t be mitigated by affluence or intellectualizing, and from the opening scenes of Meiyun getting herded through an impersonal, ageist health-care system, the pitiless modern world conspires to demoralize them and defeat any hope of grace. Meiyun, especially. In one harrowing sequence, she confronts a shady manufacturer for a refund, only to leave owing more than she came for. Every day is a struggle for money and clicks, whereas Baoshu has all but dropped out of society. Their mutual heartbreak is so intense that it’s manifested in their bellies, albeit to opposite effect–and maybe it’s nascent motherhood that finds Meiyun offering to care for him in the first place. (Baoshu’s own beloved mother died while he was in the stir.) But for all their yin-yang harmony, she can’t meaningfully connect with him.

There is a moment where, I confess, I caught myself shipping them in which Meiyun tries to capitalize on a curious optimism in the air by giving Baoshu a handjob. (He coolly turns away from her, alas.) He sacrificed a lot for her love, and she’s trying to give something back, but he proves as implacable as the systemic roadblocks to her peace of mind. When Meiyun finally incurs one loss too many at the climax, she does something drastic to penetrate his firewalls. Whatever she had hoped to gain from reuniting with him, her shocking coup de grâce wipes the slate clean of the guilt and resentments that were preventing them from having the cleansing cry they both needed all along. If the dissonance between the gesture and the result hits like a freight train, that doesn’t make the bittersweet tableau of these fucked-up people breaking the spell of trauma any less cathartic or tender. I won’t soon forget Baoshu and Meiyun, although the camera’s amnesia is swift and brutal as it pulls back on the oblivious hubbub of a Guangzhou bus terminal. There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.

Love is also a destructive force in Curry Barker’s too-generically titled Obsession, the sophomore feature of yet another viral-video artist who has pivoted, not unpromisingly, to high-concept horror, à la Zach Cregger and the Philippou Brothers. Bear (Michael Johnston) is a music-store employee mentally preparing himself to ask out his adorable longtime crush and co-worker, Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Fate intervenes when he finds himself in an antiques shop, where he stumbles on an ’80s novelty invented for the film called One Wish Willow: make a wish, snap the stick-like toy in two, and voilà! Your prayer is answered. Convinced he’s been friend-zoned when he drops Nikki off one evening, Bear, still parked in her driveway, uses the One Wish Willow to ask for her to love him more than anything in the world. Nikki suddenly reappears in a stark, silhouetted form outside his car–and we’re off to the races. (Barker somewhat diabolically plays with silhouettes throughout, and teases at grotesquerie as Nikki hides her face behind objects like a living Magritte painting.) I like how Obsession more or less skips the honeymoon phase and goes straight to the irony of Bear’s wish coming true, in all its hollowness and imprecise syntax: He has buyer’s remorse pretty much from the start, since Nikki’s affection for him is so transparently inorganic and irrational.

I like, too, that his desperation to undo his mistake leads him to another genie (Reddit, natch) and eventually back to the curio place, where the clerk provocatively suggests that he’s the victim of somebody else’s wish. I don’t really know what to say about Obsession‘s sexual politics other than that it grasps some fickle truth about men wanting total devotion and jealousy from a partner until they get it. (That being said, there is a potentially shrewder film to be made about the guy who likes Nikki this way because she’s eager to please.) I doubt Obsession would work with the genders flipped, given that a) male obsession is never droll and b) this is a movie interested in mining laughs from the incongruity of the tiny, unthreatening Navarrette becoming an agent of chaos. The picture reminded me of Oz Perkins’s The Monkey in its escalating lawlessness and tone of comic dread, though its hook is more universal and its logic more ruthless. (The faux branding of One Wish Willow, meanwhile, is a humble triumph of production design on par with the titular monkey.) For what it’s worth, none of the body mortification upset me like the subplot about a dead cat did–but that’s my cross to bear. The Sun Rises on Us All – Programme: Centrepiece; Obsession – Programme: Midnight Madness