All Shall Be Well – A Touching If Minor Drama of Fractured Family

The following is a review from the 2024 Making Waves Montreal Film Festival.

Under some roofs, family is everything—the cornerstone of a healthy, fulfilling life, and a testament to all that is good and worth living for; under some roofs, family is a burden—a nuisance of judgment and obligation to be escaped from at the earliest convenience. There are some households, however, that land somewhere else on the spectrum: those that understand and observe a certain sanctity in the unity that comes with blood ties, but can only extend that unity so far. It’s in these households, perhaps, that betrayals and heartbreak cut the deepest, as that’s where the true tests of strength are observed and, oftentimes, failed.

Most of the time, these varieties of betrayal in the family unit come about between those tied together by marriage, and All Shall Be Well exemplifies this reality in near-heartrending fashion. What writer-director Ray Yeung understands is that such situations cut the deepest not because they’re the most unexpected, but because they always linger in the darkest corners of the house, waiting for the moment when the truth about who is perceived as a real part of the family can no longer lie just outside of view, and the lights are turned on to reveal what what we all knew was in those corners once and for all.

This is the fate that eventually befalls Angie (Au), a middle-aged woman living with her longtime partner Pat (Lin Lin) in Hong Kong. The love that binds these two together is precisely the sort that could never be broken by the sort of animosity and dormant disrespect that affects so many relationships, which makes it all the more tragic when Pat suddenly dies in her sleep. Faced with the hardship of losing the love of her life, Angie is doubly challenged by the inheritance issue that arises with Pat’s family; unable to have gotten married at home, Angie has no legal claim to Pat’s property, a fact somewhat exploited by the deceased’s blood relatives.

This isn’t to say that Pat’s surviving brother Shing (Bo) and his own nuclear family are evil parasites just waiting for the chance to cut Angie out of their lives; in fact, their collective relationship seems to be one that was always amicable. But times are tough, and the financial strain that would be relieved by the sale of Angie’s apartment might be enough to keep Shing from working the graveyard shift at the carpark at such an advanced age. It’s a difficult conundrum, and one that Shing’s son Victor (Chung-Hang Leung), always loyal to his two aunts, is devastated to be involved in.

This overlying sense of reluctance across this entire ugly situation is the primary asset of Yeung’s vision, as All Shall Be Well does its best to align its sympathies with Angie while not reducing her in-laws to caricatured monsters. His script spends ample time with Angie and her struggles to honour the memory of the woman she loved so much, and at the same time, finds equal opportunity to show the financial troubles faced by the in-laws without ever lingering on them too forcefully. It’s not all about money, though, as a choice moment in which Shing believes himself to be alone at his sister’s columbarium wordlessly illustrates the pain he’s been holding so deep inside.

It’s this respect for avoiding the trappings of the evil in-law stereotype that eventually betrays All Shall Be Well, as Yeung, at a certain point, seems to tip the scales a bit too close to one side when it all comes to bear in the film’s final act. It’s especially disheartening as Yeung sets himself up with a beautifully non-insistent implication through the actions of one character—one whose actions in this respect would be the most difficult to endure—only to bring the underlying viciousness right to the surface with an extremely clichéd exchange between two others.

Choices like these do a grave disservice to the gentility that the film generally allows to guide its motion, as Au’s performance finds all the right pockets of grief and anguish to illustrate with her body language and the silences of the room alone; even a shot from the back of her head is enough for Au to communicate so many years of pent-up distress at a society that will only allow her love in passing, until such a time when it becomes inconvenient for them. This subtext, brought right up to the fore, is what gives Yeung’s subtlety of craft the space to give his characters some weight outside the present moment.

To a degree, this subtlety also leaves All Shall Be Well feeling somewhat slight when it’s all said and done, as the particular details of Angie’s relationship with her in-laws—in becoming increasingly standard for a story of this type—wind up highlighting how little we actually got to understand her relationship with Pat. With most of the context relegated to mourning anecdotes, Ray Yeung leaves the central love that binds his film together almost entirely dependent on the wedges that serve to drive it apart. Pat may be gone, but Angie’s love for her will never die; All Shall Be Well, when it’s all said and done, can’t quite claim to construct quite as strong a bond between us and its quietly shattered subject.

still courtesy of Strand Releasing

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.

Julian Malandruccolo

letterboxd.com/CynicOfCinema/