Film Review: The Sun Rises on Us All 日掛中天 (2025) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
There is a particular kind of quiet devastation in Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises on Us All. It does not arrive with grand declarations or swelling music. It settles in slowly, like humidity in a southern Chinese summer, until you realize you have been breathing it the whole time.
Meiyun (Xin Zhilei) and Baoshu (Zhang Songwen) were once lovers. Years ago, a fatal accident on a dark road forced a terrible choice. Baoshu took the blame and went to prison. Meiyun moved on, or tried to. Now they meet again in a hospital corridor — she newly pregnant by a married man who will never fully claim her, he carrying a body that is already failing him. What follows is not a reunion of the romantic kind. It is a reckoning.
Xin Zhilei, who deservedly took the Volpi Cup at Venice, gives a performance of remarkable restraint and sudden, piercing honesty. Her Meiyun is not a tragic heroine posing for our sympathy. She is a woman trying to keep a small clothing shop afloat, managing a complicated pregnancy, and living with a debt she can never quite repay. Xin lets us see the calculation in her eyes, the guilt she has learned to carry like an extra organ, and the fleeting moments when something softer still flickers. Zhang Songwen matches her beat for beat. His Baoshu is weary, stubborn, and quietly furious — a man who sacrificed everything and discovered that sacrifice does not automatically confer grace. Together they create a relationship that feels lived-in and exhausted, two people who once knew each other’s bodies and now can barely look at each other without flinching.
Cai Shangjun, working from a script co-written with his wife Han Nianjin, refuses easy catharsis. The film is patient, sometimes almost stubbornly so. It watches Meiyun sell clothes via livestream with a forced smile. It watches Baoshu navigate the indignities of illness. It allows long silences in which the past sits between them like a third person in the room. The camera, operated by Kim Hyun-seok, stays close without becoming intrusive, capturing the texture of ordinary life in Guangzhou and its surrounding cities — the fluorescent lights of malls, the institutional greens of hospitals, the heavy air of shared apartments.
The film’s title, drawn from a line in the Cantonese opera The Legend of the Purple Hairpin, carries both hope and irony. “The sun hangs in the middle of the sky, looking especially red.” There is light here, but it is the harsh, exposing light of midday, not the gentle glow of redemption. Cai is interested in the moral weight of love when it becomes obligation, and in the way people keep living even after they have broken something essential in themselves and each other.
Not every moment lands with equal force. At times the relentless accumulation of misfortune risks tipping into a kind of emotional overdetermination. Yet the central performances hold the film steady. When Meiyun and Baoshu finally confront what still binds them, the scene does not feel engineered for tears. It feels earned — two people who have run out of places to hide from each other and from themselves.
The Sun Rises on Us All is not an easy film, nor a particularly comforting one. It understands that some debts cannot be settled, only lived with. In its best moments, it makes that hard truth feel almost tender. (Neo, 2026)