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The film frames the painstaking details of daily life in the scrubby confinement of the family kitchen table, which also serves as the father's hide processing work station. Language is terse, but engaging wherever it occurs. There is no plot other than the preparation, cooking, and eating of Chinese dumplings, whereby the family conversation revolves around the uncertainty about the family business.

So, what's the point?

One way to interpret the film is to see the compulsively slow pace, the insistence on the minuscule details, and more importantly, the warmth, steadiness, and predictability of family life - metaphorically portrayed as the procedural routine of dumpling making, as an antithesis of the fast pace, uncertainty, and over-arousal of modern life. If that's Liu's goal, she has certainly succeeded by forcing the viewer to attend to the inertness and particularities of mundane life.

This film intends to communicate the subtlety and depth of human relationship. But it turned out laughably crass, shallow, and ... creepy. The worst element, visually and thematically, is the tacky and bloody kongfu scene that evokes disgust and horror, and bewilderment. The wild beauty of nature is completely spoiled by the bloodiness and tackiness of that surreal scene.

The philosophical reference -- Zhuang Tsu's butterfly -- is irrelevant and makes the film pretentious and plain awkward.

What one is left with after viewing the film are basically two things: disgust and disappointment.

Don't waste your time on this one.