Before the Military Drill
2022 · 24m · Taiwan
Directed by Chun-Wei Wang
Tones: contemplative, tense
Xiao-Yu, a Chinese woman married into a Taiwanese family, juggles work and caring for her mother-in-law while her brother-in-law resents her origins — and a cross-strait military drill upends everything.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Wang refuses the obvious geopolitical thriller setup—the military drill is almost incidental noise, background radiation to a story that's actually about linguistic alienation and family resentment, which is refreshingly perverse, but the film doesn't quite commit hard enough to its own weirdness.
A formally precise chamber drama that inherits the DNA of Taiwanese New Wave domestic cinema while centering a cross-strait perspective that complicates the family unit from within; the editing rhythm between intimate kitchen scenes and distant military sirens creates a sophisticated thematic dialogue about proximity and displacement.
The performance restraint—especially in Xiao-Yu's face during moments of non-reaction—combined with Wang's decision to keep the geopolitical threat entirely offscreen and sonic, transforms what could've been melodrama into something genuinely unsettling about who gets to belong in a home.