Painful, funny — and with a brilliant twist: The Farewell reviewed

The Farewell is a quiet film that builds and builds and builds into a wonderful exploration of belonging, loss, family love, crab vs lobster, and hiding feelings, even though it may be tough to hide yours and you’ll shed a tear or two. I know I did.

It is written and directed by Lulu Wang, who was born in Beijing but emigrated with her family to America when she was six, and it is loosely a memoir. The film opens in Changchun, a city in China’s northeast, with an elderly woman being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and given maybe three months to live.

This is Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), or ‘Grandma’, and she doesn’t know she is going to die because her family have chosen not to tell her, as appears to be the Chinese custom. (Her sister, Little Nai Nai, played by Wang’s real-life great-aunt, tells her that the CT scans show only ‘benign shadows’, then shoos her from the hospital.