by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Courtesy of Dekanalog
This is a No Man is an Island film review written in collaboration with Cinema Escapist as part of coverage of the 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Keep an eye out for more!
DAUGHTER’S DAUGHTER starts off strong enough, but eventually loses the plot. This occurs due to its reliance on tropes now well-trod in Taiwanese cinema, as well its overdependence on legendary actress Sylvia Chang.
Daughter’s Daughter follows 65-year-old Ai, her two daughters, and her mother. Ai has a troubled relationship with both of her children, having abandoned her elder daughter Emma—who she gave birth to as a teenager—in New York to be raised by another couple,. Her other daughter, Zuren, is rebellious and openly lesbian, though at the film’s start, she does not appear to have come out to her mother. The two sisters only learn of each other’s existence after Ai has a fall in Taipei and is hospitalized.
Photo courtesy of Dekanalog
Fast forward a few years and Zuren, who is in her thirties, is attempting to have a child through IVF with her girlfriend, Jiayi, in New York. But after a dinner with Emma, Zuren and Jiayi are tragically killed in a car accident driving back to New Jersey.
Ai is left to pick up the pieces, then. Traveling to the US to take care of the funeral arrangements, Ai finds that Zuren had one successfully inseminated embryo. Though Ai initially wishes to terminate the embryo, she comes into conflict with Emma, who believes that the embryo should be brought to term by a surrogate and accuses her mother of again seeking to abandon a child.
Daughter’s Daughter dovetails with many of the recurrent themes of Taiwanese film in the past few years. There have been many movies that focus on the troubled relationship between a mother and her children, whether that is 2024’s Yen and Ai-lee or 2020‘s Little Big Women. To this extent, there is an increasingly natalist streak to Taiwanese movies at a time in which Taiwan is among the world’s leaders in declining birthrates, as seen in 2025’s Unexpected Courage or 2018’s Baobao, which is also about a lesbian couple seeking to give birth.
Photo courtesy of Dekanalog
If Daughter’s Daughter falls short, it is because it falls into the tired trope of “Bury Your Gays” by killing off Zuren relatively quickly in the movie. In spite of the potential to develop the dynamic between Ai’s extended family or focus on the troubled relationship between Zuren and Emma, Zuren proves an underdeveloped character in that regard. All the more shame, considering that Eugenie Liu’s performance at Zuren commands every scene that she appears in.
Much of the rest of the movie simply proves to be a melodrama, hanging together mostly by virtue of Sylvia Chang’s strong stage presence in her role as Ai. Chang is successful in evoking the mercuriality and stubbornness of aging parents, and Karena Lam does what she can in her role as Emma, but the dynamic between the characters never rises above simple melodrama. Though Lam seems to have more chemistry with Liu in the only scene in which the two sisters are alone together, this is never explored because of Zuren’s swift death.
In this way, rather than simply telling a story that is compelling in its own right, Daughter’s Daughter proves only interested in mawkish attempts to pull at the viewer’s heartstrings. This is its ultimate failure as a film.