General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Falls

The Falls (瀑布) is a 2021 Taiwanese psychological drama film directed and co-written by Chung Mong-hong (钟孟宏), starring Alyssa Chia (贾静雯) and Gingle Wang (王净) as a single mother and her teenage daughter whose relationship breaks down under COVID-19 quarantine and the mother's developing mental illness.¹ The film won four awards at the 58th Golden Horse Awards, including Best Feature Film and Best Actress, and represented Taiwan in the Academy Awards' Best International Film category.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / director	瀑布 (The Falls), directed by Chung Mong-hong, written by Chung Mong-hong and Chang Yao-sheng (张耀升)¹
Format	Taiwan, 2021, Mandarin, 129 minutes, color, DCP¹^•²
Lead cast	Alyssa Chia as Pin-wen, Gingle Wang as Xiao-jing, with Chen Yi-wen and Lee Lee-zen¹
Taiwan release	October 29, 2021, distributed by Sony Pictures⁴^•⁵
Golden Horse Awards (58th, 2021)	Won Best Feature Film, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Film Score; nominated in 11 categories²
Festival circuit	Competed in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival; screened at the Toronto International Film Festival⁴
Taiwan box office	NT$36,452,168 cumulative⁶
Streaming	Released on Netflix from January 29, 2022⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Pin-wen (品文) is a manager at a foreign-owned company in Taipei; her daughter Xiao-jing (小静) is a high-school senior preparing for university entrance exams. When a classmate of Xiao-jing tests positive for COVID-19, the whole class is sent home to quarantine, and the company asks Pin-wen to stay home as well. Confined together in their apartment, the two argue constantly.¹^•⁸

Pin-wen's condition deteriorates. She calls her ex-husband Chi-wen (奇文, played by Lee Lee-zen) for comfort, but he has remarried and pushes her away. After a night of storm, Xiao-jing learns her mother has been hospitalized after standing on a bridge in emotional distress, and father and daughter discover that the quarrel and the storm may never actually have happened.¹ The New Taipei film office describes the mother's illness as progressing schizophrenia.³

The daughter takes over. After Pin-wen returns home, Xiao-jing begins managing her mother's life and discovers the household has fallen behind on loan and management-fee payments. Pin-wen loses her job, starts a fire while distracted cooking, and is hospitalized again. A psychiatrist tells Xiao-jing her mother must take medication regularly or her condition will worsen. Xiao-jing proposes selling the apartment and renting elsewhere; Pin-wen eventually takes simple work at a supermarket.¹

The title is explained late in the film: Pin-wen describes hearing a roaring in her ears that makes her irritable and self-harming, then realizes the sound is that of a waterfall.¹ The waterfall serves as a metaphor for pressure that accumulates under the pandemic and eventually bursts.³

Production

Chung Mong-hong wrote the film with Chang Yao-sheng, and the story was inspired by a real event that happened to a friend of the director.¹^•⁴ Production began in September 2020, and although the film is set against the pandemic, COVID-19 did not affect its production; Taiwan's own major outbreak came in May 2021 with the arrival of the delta variant.⁹ Producer Chu Yu-ning (瞿友宁) joined after Chung called asking for help finding funding; having read the script, he volunteered as producer.¹⁰

The important flooding-river scene was shot around the Tonghou River in Wulai, New Taipei.³ A recurring visual device is the blue construction tarp covering the protagonists' apartment building for most of the film, which bathes the living room in a dark, cold tone; promotional material reads the tarp as an unfinished but anticipated future, its blue base like sheets of falling water.¹¹^•⁴

Release and reception

The film premiered in the Horizons (地平线) competition section of the Venice Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival before its Taiwanese theatrical release on October 29, 2021, following preview screenings from October 22 to 24.⁴^•¹² It was the second consecutive Chung film to represent Taiwan in the Academy Awards' Best International Film competition, after A Sun (阳光普照).³^•¹³ Netflix began streaming it on January 29, 2022.⁷

At the 58th Golden Horse Awards in December 2021, The Falls received 11 nominations and won four awards, the most of any film that year: Best Feature Film, Best Actress for Alyssa Chia, Best Original Screenplay for Chung Mong-hong and Chang Yao-sheng, and Best Original Film Score for Lu Luming.²^•¹⁴ Both Chia and Wang were nominated for Best Actress.² In Taiwan the film earned NT$36,452,168 cumulatively, with Taipei box office of NT$16.99 million reported by January 2022.⁶^•⁵

Critical response. The Taipei Times praised the cinematography, mood, and acting while finding the plot slow-moving, "more like a winding stream than a waterfall."¹¹ The Los Angeles Times review highlighted Chia's performance of Pin-wen's passage "from chaos to balance" alongside Wang's portrayal of her daughter's maturation, and noted Lu Luming's score as conveying "a calming hopefulness."¹⁵ The South China Morning Post observed that the film's two-hander female lead structure was an anomaly for a director whose earlier work centered on crime and criminals.¹⁶

Place in Chung Mong-hong's career

The Falls was Chung's first film centered on female characters, following the multiple Golden Horse winner A Sun (2019).²^•¹⁶ Chung, who also works as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Nakagawa Naguo (中岛长雄), had earlier won Best Director for The Fourth Portrait (第四张画) and Best Feature Film for A Sun; his debut feature Parking (停车) screened in Cannes' Un Certain Regard.²^•¹⁷ In interviews around the release, Chung said the film was not simply a pandemic film but an attempt to show attitudes toward life in each moment and the distance between people during the pandemic, and he pointed to the daughter's way of caring for her mother as a sign of hope in the younger generation.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2020 to 2022

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

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