General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Dwelling by the West Lake

Dwelling by the West Lake (草木人间) is a 2024 Chinese drama film co-written and directed by Gu Xiaogang (顾晓刚), in which a young graduate tries to rescue his mother after she is drawn into a pyramid scheme in Hangzhou. It is the second installment of Gu's "landscape painting" (山水图) film series, following Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, and it adapts the Buddhist tale "Mulian Rescues His Mother" to a contemporary story of fraud and filial piety.¹^•² The film premiered in the main competition of the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival on October 28, 2023, opened across China on April 3, 2024, and was promoted as the country's first anti-pyramid-scheme feature film.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and series	Gu Xiaogang's second feature and the second work of his "landscape painting" series, after Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains¹
Story basis	A modern retelling of the Buddhist tale "Mulian Rescues His Mother," set around a pyramid scheme called Butterfly International¹
Lead cast	Leo Wu (吴磊) as He Mulian, Jiang Qinqin (蒋勤勤) as Wu Taihua, Chen Jianbin (陈建斌) as Lao Qian, Wang Jiajia as Wan Qing⁵
Release	Premiered October 28, 2023 at the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival; Chinese theatrical release April 3, 2024, in the Qingming holiday slot³^•⁶
Box office	Passed 90 million yuan by April 14, 2024; totaled 121 million yuan during its run⁷^•⁸
Honors	Gu Xiaogang received the Kurosawa Akira Award at Tokyo; Jiang Qinqin won Best Actress at the 17th Asian Film Awards³^•⁹
Reception	Douban rating opened at 7.3 and fell to 6.5 amid polarized reviews⁷

Spoilers

Plot and source tale

The story follows He Mulian (何目莲), a recent university graduate who comes to Hangzhou to search for his father, missing for ten years, and his mother Wu Taihua (吴苔花), a migrant tea picker who moves to the city to support him. After an emotional falling-out with the owner of the tea plantation where she works, Taihua is persuaded by her close friend Jinlan to join a fraud organization called Butterfly International. She is transformed by the group's indoctrination into a zealous recruiter, and Mulian exhausts himself trying to pull her out while continuing to look for his father.¹^•⁴

The film takes its structure from "Mulian Rescues His Mother" (目连救母), a story that first appeared in the Sutra on the Foundation of the Ullambana Offering in the third or fourth century and has circulated in China for more than 1,700 years. In the original, the Buddha's disciple Mulian saves his damned mother through filial devotion and the Buddha's mercy; the film transposes this redemption plot into a contemporary setting, with the son's rescue of his mother standing in for the descent into and return from hell.¹⁰^•¹¹ Critics noted that the film follows the story's logic closely: Taihua is at peace while picking tea in the mountains, loses herself after entering the city and the scheme, and is finally carried by her son into the deep hills, where a mountain-calling ritual wakes her, echoing Mulian carrying his mother out of the fires of hell.¹⁰

Production

Gu Xiaogang, a Hangzhou native whose debut Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains had won acclaim at home and abroad, turned with his second feature from that film's diffuse family narrative to a pointed social problem. He said the subject arose from research into how victims of pyramid schemes might be rescued psychologically, and that he hoped the film would offer society a warning.¹²^•³

Field research. To reproduce the schemes accurately, Gu and his crew went undercover inside real pyramid-scheme organizations for several months. Gu described boarding a scheme's bus and beginning to feel the indoctrination himself; in writing the film he deliberately adopted the organizer's point of view to design the fraud storyline. The production claimed a "98% similarity" to real scams and presented the "brainwashing" process on Chinese cinema screens for the first time.¹²^•⁴

The film was shot largely in Hangzhou and is a Zhejiang-produced picture. Gu staged scenes at West Lake landmarks including Leifeng Pagoda and the Meijiawu tea hills, and said the film presents several of the city's classic ten scenes, such as Su Causeway in Spring and Evening Bell at Nanping Hill.¹²^•¹³ The screenplay is credited to Gu Xiaogang, Guo Shuang, and Wang Xufeng; the score is by the Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi (梅林茂), the cinematography by Gu Daming, and the art direction by Chen Jianbin, who also acts in the film.⁵^•² Unlike the near-nonprofessional cast of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, the sequel stars established actors, backed by substantial financing.¹¹

Themes and style

Gu organized the film around three thematic pairs: humanity and nature, humanity and desire, and humanity and other people, using them to deconstruct the Mulian tale for the present day.⁸ The nature theme carries the redemption logic: Taihua is content in the tea fields, and her madness and recovery are both bound to the mountains, culminating in the opening "mountain-calling" ritual and its reprise when her son uses the same cry of the hills to call her back to herself. Gu said he wanted the "spiritual awakening" in the film to come from something beautiful rather than from the scheme, and that he hoped his mother figure would, like grass and trees, find the true direction of the light.¹⁰^•¹⁴

The desire theme drew on the tale's long narrative tradition. Commentators observed that Gu, like the Ming-era playwright Zheng Zhizhen in his Script for Encouraging Goodness: Mulian Rescues His Mother, softens the mother's "sin": Taihua's fault is her desire for money and self-realization, committed in pursuit of a decent life, and the film deliberately unbalances the tale's usual equation of sin and punishment by making her a sympathetic figure while greed is distributed across nearly every character.¹⁰

Visually the film continues the series' translation of Chinese landscape-painting aesthetics into cinema, with lingering shots of the West Lake, tea hills, temples, and bells.²^•¹³ The middle section, inside the scheme, shifts to a distorted, feverish register that several critics found at odds with the realist and lyrical material around it.⁸^•¹¹

Release and reception

After its Tokyo premiere, where it competed for the main-prize award and Gu received the Kurosawa Akira Award as the youngest recipient in the award's history and the third Chinese-language director honored after Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chen Kaige, the film was selected as the opening film of the 14th Beijing International Film Festival and released in China on April 3, 2024, in the Qingming holiday slot.³^•²^•⁶ On March 10, 2024, Jiang Qinqin won Best Actress at the 17th Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong for her portrayal of Taihua's slide from meek tea picker into manic, indoctrinated recruiter.⁹

Marketing and box office. The publicity campaign foregrounded the anti-pyramid-scheme angle, with the slogan "one person joins a scheme, the whole family suffers," and released a theme song sung by Chen Li. The film passed 90 million yuan at the box office by the afternoon of April 14, its twelfth day on release, and finished its run at 121 million yuan.⁴^•⁷^•⁸

Critical response. Reception was polarized. The Douban score opened at 7.3 and dropped to 6.5 within days; dissatisfied viewers criticized the split between art-film and commercial registers, the exaggerated characterization, and the use of static long takes, while praising the cinematography and Jiang Qinqin's performance.⁷^•⁶ Reviewers in Wenhui Daily and Literary Gazette argued that the marketing's isolation of the pyramid-scheme middle section heightened the film's structural fractures, and that the hellish scheme sequences sat awkwardly against the landscape imagery.¹⁵^•¹¹ Other commentary credited the film with an accurate rendering of indoctrination tactics, such as affirming desires, negating a person's present life, and rebuilding identity, and with genuine social warning value.¹⁶^•¹⁷ In a Communication University of China research team's 2024 ranking of Chinese films' overseas market performance and cultural competitiveness, the film placed 15th, with overseas coverage focusing on its combination of Eastern aesthetics and social critique.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026