Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Sun’ on Netflix, an Epic Taiwanese Drama About a Family in Crisis

A Sun landed five Golden Horse awards — the Taiwanese version of the Oscars — including a best picture win, prior to its international Netflix release. Director Chung Mong-Hong’s family drama has many components of a “prestige” film: An epic 156-minute runtime, resonant characters and themes, and barely a whiff of comedy. The latter two points are easier to hurdle than the first one, which prompts one to wonder if the movie is strong enough to demand such a mighty long sit.

A SUN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Somewhere in Taipei’s middle class exists a typical family, a father, a mother and two sons: Chen (Chen Yi-Wen) is a driving instructor, Qin (Samantha Ko) is a hairdresser, A-Ho (Wu Chien-Ho) is the ne’er-do-well who’s in juvie and A-Hao (Xu Guang-Han) is the do-well studying for his med-school entrance exam. Life happens to them. A lot of life. The end? Of course not. Clean beginnings and endings are fallacies, and we catch this family smack in the thick of domestic struggle.

The film begins with Chen, whose upbeat seize-the-day philosophy contrasts with the bubbling anger inside him. He essentially disowns A-Ho when his delinquency turns disturbingly violent (illustrated in one hell of a doozy of an opening sequence), going so far as to ask the judge to throw the book at the teen so lessons will be learned. It’s pretty clear that A-Hao is his favorite, which angers Qin; she presses her husband to say when he’s actually helped his wayward youngest son, and he has no answer.

Once the movie establishes the family’s complicated dynamic, it throws bends, about-faces and outright breaks into its troubled existence. A-Ho’s 15-year-old girlfriend, Xiao Yu (Wu Dai-Ling), turns up at their door, pregnant, and Qin takes her in. The father of the boy A-Ho and his friend Radish (Liu Kuan-Ting) brutally assaulted turns up to demand monetary compensation from Chen. A-Ho quarrels with a rival bunkmate in jail. A-Hao meets a young woman in class, but keeps her a secret.

Further tragedy disrupts the narrative — and so do screenwriters Mong-Hong and Chang Yaosheng, who abruptly jump three years into the future, where A-Ho struggles to move forward as husband, father and upright citizen, with the weights of the past chained to his ankles. Qin and Chen’s marriage is defined by discord. Are there ever any easy solutions to these problems? In this movie, maybe, but on second thought, maybe not.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Farewell, also about a Chinese family’s myriad problems, isn’t just superficially similar. The collective unit at its core deals with tragedy that’s yet to come — the cancer diagnosis of its beloved grandmother — with a winning blend of wit and momentousness. Watch that film instead.

Performance Worth Watching: To Ko’s benefit, her character is rich in motherly empathy — and the perfect balance to the total cretin Kuan-Ting plays. You’ll love Qin and hate Radish.

Memorable Dialogue: “At least we can worry together,” Qin says, upon the birth of her grandchild, to Xiao Yu’s adopted mother — and she clearly understands that the heaviest of blessings and anxieties are best burdened collectively, not singularly.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: As earnest and thoughtful as A Sun can be, its sheer length has us parsing the differences between languishing and lingering. Mong-Hong knows that creating a lived-in setting and story generates subtle implications in character dynamics and yields authenticity. But as contemplative pauses begin to dominate dialogue exchanges, the film’s weighty tone wavers between meaningful and taxing.

This isn’t to say the family’s attempt to piece their lives together in the wake of tragedy isn’t dramatically effective; Mong-Hong’s occasional visual poetic flourishes (including a beautiful and inspired animated sequence) deepen the film’s emotional impact. And yet, his metaphors are often heavy-handed, the conclusion teeters on the precipice of mawkish melodrama and the plot’s suspenseful crime-drama elements feel jammed in, and tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I hate to reduce a well-meaning film down to math, but A Sun asks just a little too much from its audience, and its rewards fall ever so slightly short.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream A Sun on Netflix