Locked inside one home by a pandemic quarantine, a mother and her daughter finally have to look at each other. Chung Mong-Hong's The Falls turns that confinement into an intimate Taiwanese drama about the strain and repair of a family bond.
What is The Falls about?
The premise is simple and, for anyone who lived through 2020 and 2021, painfully familiar. A COVID-19 quarantine order confines a mother and her daughter to the same home for an open-ended stretch of days. With nowhere to go and no one else to talk to, the small irritations of sharing a space grow into something larger, and the things each of them has been carrying alone can no longer be hidden from the other. The mother is dealing with obstacles of her own that she has kept out of view; the daughter has her own frustrations and her own way of shutting doors. Forced proximity strips away the routines that let them avoid each other, and what follows is a slow renegotiation of who looks after whom.
About the cast
Alyssa Chia and Gingle Wang head the cast, supported by Lee-zen Lee, Waa Wei, Yi-Wen Chen, Guan-Ting Liu, Huang Hsin-Yao and Shao-Huai Chang. With so much of the running time spent inside one home, the acting has to do the work that plot usually does. The performances favour restraint over outburst, which suits a story that is largely about what people do not say.
Context & significance
Directed by Chung Mong-Hong, The Falls is a Taiwanese production and a 2021 release. The catalogue lists it under drama and romance, and its approach to the quarantine setting is to use the lockdown as a pressure chamber rather than a novelty, a device for forcing long-buried family tension into the open. At roughly two hours and nine minutes, the film is long for a two-hander, and it uses that length to let its characters change gradually instead of in a single confrontation.
Watching The Falls on Ktime
The Falls is available on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can choose whichever suits their household. The whole K-Time experience runs in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora. This page is free to read; watching the film requires signing in with a K-Time account.