Taiwanese director Huang Xi’s latest is a prickly and meditative family drama about mothers and daughters. Daughter’s Daughter pivots on the performance of Sylvia Chang who plays Jin Aixia, a 60-something divorcée with two distant adult daughters: Emma (Karena Lam), the firstborn given away by Jin as a teen who grew up in New York; and Fan Zuer (Eugenie Liu), the rebellious queer second born who grew up in Taipei with her difficult mother. When Fan Zuer and her partner unexpectedly die in a car accident while receiving IVF treatments in America, Jin confronts her past and future as a reluctant mother.
The film contains a captivating premise—what would you do if you became responsible for deciding the fate of your dead daughter’s embryo?—but the execution of the narrative doesn’t quite do it justice. Daughter’s Daughter is not a sensationalist story. It’s ponderous and sad with characters who are broken, stuck, and seeking relief that eludes them. It’s also a fairly realistic portrayal of the way certain feelings and arguments are repressed in East Asian families until it’s too late to reveal them.
Backstories don’t come to the fore until the second half of the film, which can make the first half a little bit of a challenge to get through. For a majority of the plot, Jin is hard to empathize with until she finally speaks about what she went through and why she left Emma behind.
Thrillingly, Daughter’s Daughter is also very much a movie about women and their decisions, and about how they rebel against society and family. Jin may not be likeable at first, but she has reasons for why she chooses certain paths. Both she and the audience must reckon with her complexities and contradictions, too.
