Review of ‘Existence towards Death’ – Chinese hospital comedy-drama uses brave patients to ask big questions | film

‘PDo you know the law of entropy? “Life is a process of constant degeneration,” says one doctor in this Chinese comedy-drama set in a hospital, but you wouldn’t know that from the frenetic, chatty first half hour of director Chen Sicheng’s death-focused film. “Existence to Death” begins with caregiver Xiao Ping (Jiang Long) about to throw himself off the roof because, after a plan to flog his robot bosses goes wrong, he falls into the clutches of a triad of loan sharks. Fortunately, the film later settles into an intermittently affecting group drama with a meta-tinge; Even if it does not fully realize the depths to which it aims.

After returning from the brink, the hospital director talked Xiao Ping into leading a project studying mental health interventions in end-stage cancer care. So he finds himself among the “Ward 10 Brave Squad”, a group of patients whose prognoses are as brave as their prognoses are bleak. It’s not long before he selects film director Dao (Wang Zichuan) to produce a documentary about his roommates, including rising real estate tycoon Mao (Kai Ming), troubled first son Bowen (Huang Yi), and fiber-spinning glove Xiao Ping (Yi Quanxi) — nicknamed Little Ping.

“Existence Towards Death” appears to be Chen’s attempt to produce heavier material than the Chinatown Detective Quartet for which he is best known. At one point, Xiao Ping appears to act as his own spokesman when he rebukes a group of film directors who scuttled Dao’s latest screenplay. “Domestic movies and TV are so bad lately. Is it because creators don’t talk about creativity anymore?” Although the film’s broad, expository comedy, which sings that we’re all in this thing called life together, isn’t groundbreaking, it at least has serious questions on its mind. He wanders around the different roommates, investing enough in each character to make the prevailing sentiments often fly.

While convalescents here cite wine, food, and nature as things that make life worthwhile, cinema is clearly Chen’s answer to that question—judging by the self-referential elements threaded throughout. There’s more than a touch of self-irony in his agent, Dao, who is constantly searching for edgy material and spouting directorial quotes (he even makes cheeky references to Chen himself). Ignoring the advice of sixth-generation master Jia Zhangke to avoid emotion at all costs – whom the group met on an outing to Hengdian Universal Studios – Chen seems to aspire, like Dao, to a “bittersweet” perspective on existence. But he’s not quite on Jia’s level, otherwise he would realize that the bitterness needed for fermentation is largely absent here.