Papa 2023

Nin, Huang Bo returns to his busy cha chaan teng on a morning that should feel ordinary, but the atmosphere around him is thick with wary glances and quiet questions from colleagues and neighbors. The day abruptly shifts into a brutal revelation: his son Ming killed Nin’s wife Yin and daughter Grace, and turned himself in to the police the night before. In the days that follow, Nin sells the restaurant to one of his long-time waiters, choosing distance from the place that has become a chamber of painful memories. He then attends Ming’s trial, where Ming’s confession unfolds with a chilling clarity: the killings were driven by a voice telling him he had a mission to eradicate a portion of the population in order to save the world.

Sometime later, Nin spends an evening with his mother and his sister’s family, and a carefully kept lie about his wife and children finally comes to light as his mother reveals she has known the truth all along. The story then plunges into a deeper past: Nin remembers meeting Yin back in 1993, when their families opposed the union, yet Nin resolves to marry Yin, and the couple welcomes their first son. This recollection sheds light on the stubborn devotion that runs through the family’s history, even as it foreshadows the fractures to come.

Nin visits Ming in prison and asks about a pardon to increase the number of visits, a request Ming resists with a string of excuses. Left alone at home with their house cat Carnation, Nin’s loneliness edges toward desperation when he hires a door-to-door prostitute, only for deceit to break apart the fragile emotional balance and trigger an emotional breakdown. A subsequent family therapy session, guided by a psychiatrist, brings Nin and Ming into a tense, candid conversation. Nin demands an explanation for the murders, and Ming finally bares his true thoughts, admitting that he feels Nin never truly listened to what their family wished to say.

Before the tragedy, Yin once urged Nin to slow down and stop running the restaurant around the clock, but Nin’s response is to keep pushing forward. Grace, meanwhile, brings home a stray cat she names Carnation, and despite Ming’s misgivings about limiting the animal’s freedom, she insists on keeping it. The pet’s presence becomes a quiet point of contention within a family already stretched thin. Carnation disappears once, only to be found again after Ming, anxious, rescues it from a perilous edge in the corridor.

During the long summer, Ming works at Nin’s restaurant and clashes with his father over a packing method, which ends in a mess and a visible rift between them. Ming asks Nin for a new phone with photography functions, but Nin refuses, arguing that multifunctional phones are prone to failure. Instead, Nin purchases a camera, which Ming protests he doesn’t want. Using his summer job salary, Ming buys the phone himself, and on a family trip to Hainan, their mother discovers the phone and returns the money she had spent, choosing not to challenge Nin outright but quietly stepping back while Nin sleeps, leaving Ming puzzled about why a discussion never happens.

By 2013, Ming has spent four years in a psychiatric hospital, and a request for early release is denied even as Nin, now retired, expresses his willingness to care for Ming full-time. Ming writes a letter to Nin, apologizing and asking his father to visit him on his eighteenth birthday. Nin does visit, but the reunion is muted, with the murders left unspoken between them. Years pass, and Ming is released as an adult, returning to the old home and sharing a quiet lunch with his father. The film closes as Ming looks at a family photo, leaving the audience with a lingering sense of what was said and unsaid within a family marked by tragedy, memory, and the fragile possibility of reconciliation.