TIFF 2024 Review: Daughter’s Daughter

A tragic car accident causes a mother to become the legal guardian of her deceased daughter’s embryo.

A gathering in a hospital situated in Taipei of an injured grandmother, mother and daughter demonstrates the generational gap that exists between them and matters come to the forefront when the lesbian daughter and her partner travel from Taipei to the U.S. for vitro fertilization treatments; while there, they are killed when their vehicle hits a deer.  The grieving mother learns that she has become the legal guardian of her daughter’s embryo and is faced with a moral dilemma which mirrors her own past where as a pregnant teenager in New York she was persuaded to give away her baby girl by her own mother and returned to Taipei where she subsequently began a new family.

Check out all of our TIFF coverageWhen it comes to dealing with contemporary issues filmmaker Huang Xi excels as smartphones and the advances in medical science where vitro ferritization has become an industry in its own right are seamlessly integrated into the narrative.  It is an intriguing premise as what to do with an embryo and equating the moral dilemma with a teenager deciding whether to give her baby up for adoption.  The other true factor is the family interaction as the comments have a sharp edge even if the intention behind them is based on caring too much.

The cinematography is unintrusive with the emphasize placed on mid shots where there is an opportunity to show characters interacting with their environment and those around them rather than narrowing the focus with tight close-up shots.  Where filmmaking falls flat is in the laborious pacing that undercuts the emotional impact of scenes and the insertion of flashbacks at times becomes disorienting.  A lot is asked of Sylvia Chang who carries the entire emotional weight of the story on the shoulders of her grieving character of Jin Aixia but despite it not being a showy performance there is still a remoteness that exists that prevents her from achieving a certain gravitas.

The 49th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 5-15, 2024, and for more information visit tiff.net.    

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada; he can be found at LinkedIn.

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