‘Guo Ran’ Review: An Exquisite Chinese Close-Up of a Woman Increasingly Alone in Her Pregnancy

Guy Lodge

6 February 2025 at 10:25 am·4-min read

An expectant mother finds her relationship almost imperceptibly coming apart — right at the moment she most needs some care and kinship — in “Guo Ran,” a silently wrenching second feature from Chinese writer-director Li Dongmei that deftly identifies generational malaise in individual crisis. The kind of brief, intimately scaled chamber drama that often gets labeled a “miniature” despite vast human stakes at play, the film proves a stealth tearjerker despite the stoic composure of Li’s filmmaking and a precise, achingly contained lead performance by Manxuan Li. Empathetic and universally identifiable, this Rotterdam competition premiere has the potential to play global arthouses if carefully nurtured through the festival circuit.

“Guo Ran” is consistent with Li’s Venice-premiered 2020 debut “Mama” as an emotionally acute but unsentimental confrontation with domestic tragedy — both films, furthermore, are strongly rooted in the director’s personal experience. “Guo Ran” is the sparser, more concentrated work: an aptly claustrophobic two-hander for a good portion of its running time, until even that number is halved, and other support systems are required. The film’s minimalism serves as a pointed evocation — a compassionate critique, even — of a contemporary urban social model where small, isolated and finally fragile domestic units have replaced a sturdier community framework. It sometimes takes a village even to have a child, let alone raise one.

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Such concerns weigh heavily on the mind of Yu (Manxuan Li), whose own mother died in childbirth while delivering her younger sister, and who hasn’t rushed into motherhood herself. Now aged 36, she has what seems a dully stable domestic setup with her boyfriend (Yitong Wang) in a tiny but tidy city apartment — if not now, then when? The couple’s current routine wants for affection and excitement: Wordless scenes of Yu scrolling on her phone while her other half is glued to his laptop say it all without dipping into hackneyed millennial-baiting cliché. These characters aren’t square-eyed cyphers, but they don’t seem to activate or agitate each other in any way.

A baby will bring change, if nothing else, and so Yu tends to her early pregnancy — the foetus, we are told at the outset, is the size of a broad bean — with a determined air of optimism that pushes her anxiety to the unspoken back of her mind. Guo Ran, her chosen name for the child, roughly translates as “as expected,” as if to allay Yu’s doubts with sheer nominative determinism. Few films have quite so delicately and tangibly conveyed a pregnant woman’s relationship with her own incrementally changing body: Tensely still but plainly sensitive to her surroundings at each turn, Manxuan Li carries herself with the nervous gravity of one carrying invaluable cargo.

Yet as her bearing and behavior change, her partner grows only more remote and recessive, wholly consumed with the screen-based demands of work — answering curtly when she raises decisions they should be making together, and barely tearing himself from his desk when, after going to the bathroom one evening, she announces alarming bloody discharge. No tears and screaming matches are forthcoming: With swift, calmly devastating strokes of omission, Li and editor Qin Yanan articulate the cruelly passive disintegration of a relationship while Yu is in physical turmoil. It’s left to the clinical-by-definition hospital system to provide what succour it can, but it’s up to Yu, her face often held in steady but shattering close-up, to heal herself from the inside out.

Li and gifted French DP Matthias Delvaux (“Snow Leopard”) counterintuitively paint Yu’s anguish in tones of stark, sun-saturated white, whether on the tellingly under-decorated walls of her apartment or the neutral comfort of starched hospital sheets — presenting the world around her as a blank slate, empty but still open to reinvention. In the absence of a musical score, Vincent Villa’s crisp sound design either amplifies or muffles her state of mind as circumstances dictate: In a film heavy on quiet, actual moments of serenity are few and far between. But even as loneliness pervades “Guo Ran,” hopelessness never does: Yu has herself, exhausted but softly resilient, when other allies fail her.

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