A decaying village nestled in the depths of an urban high-rise jungle, a close-knit community of low-income, non-local residents, a bedbound grandma who needs 24/7 care, a father who rides donkey to work, a mother vanishing into the roles of maid and housewife, a jar of coins that the family has been saving up for decades, and a young boy beating a path amid the hardest of circumstances.

From the get-go, the film Successor has all the elements of a tear-jerking coming-of-age story that traces a boy's growth as he juggles the gritty reality of poverty and the growing pains of adolescence.

Yet that façade of reality quickly collapses, as the audience discovers the boy's parents, played by the famous comedic duo Shen Teng and Ma Li, are incredibly wealthy and have constructed an elaborate alternate reality to instill in their son the drive and character necessary to one day take over their business empire.

In a manner reminiscent of the god-like series creator in The Truman Show (1998), the couple secretly orchestrates every aspect of their son's growth from a hidden underground control room, where an entourage of top educators has been assembled to act as extras and watchdogs in the strange bubble they have created.

However, that bubble is destined to pop, as Jiye, the son, must someday realize the truth of his environment.

The horror in the humor

Amid a lackluster summer movie season, which is still lagging far behind last summer's 20-billion-yuan ($2.79-billion) box office takings, the film has provided the kick that the industry severely needed.

Since its official release in Chinese theaters on

July 16, the film had raked in some 3 billion yuan ($419 million)—a third of the domestic summer box office total—as of August 12, making it the highest-grossing film of the season and one of China's biggest cinematic hits of the year, Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan reported.

When asked about why the film has stood out among other blockbuster hopefuls this season, Simon Abrams, a New York-based film critic and regular contributor to The New York Times, film review website RogerEbert.com and Vanity Fair, brought attention to the movie's comic ingenuity.

"I was really impressed by how, in each scene, there is a new setup and a new premise to deal with, and the ideas just piled up and kept building," he told Beijing Review. "The joke writing, the general execution and just the way the narrative keeps spinning out new variations really sustain its comedic effect."

Besides the film's laugh-out-loud sort of humor, industry insiders also attribute its box office triumph to its use of the comedic genre to examine the prickly theme of Chinese parenting, a topic that is often tiptoed around or handled with the utmost gravity in domestic cinema.

"The film has managed to strike a balance between commercial appeal and social relevance," Zeng Yuli, a veteran film critic, wrote in an article published on news portal ThePaper.cn. "It allows the audience to laugh throughout and later be caught up in a sense of dread as they reflect upon the many social issues that are exposed."

This sense of dread that Zeng was referring to has resonated throughout the

domestic audience. Across Chinese social media, Successor is widely referred to as a "Chinese thriller" that essentially captures the "horrors" of traditional Chinese parenting. Though lacking a clear definition, traditional Chinese parenting practices have often been described as "controlling," "overprotective" and "demanding."

"Oftentimes, comedies are tragedies narrowly averted. But Successor has transcended the thin line between comedy and tragedy to venture into the realm of horror," a top comment on Douban, China's leading media review website, read.

United by the hashtag, "Successor is a horror film," countless Chinese millennials and Gen Zs have posted about how the movie brings back painful memories of their own teenage years.

Many have noted how, like the couple in the film, their parents have given up their own dreams and lives for their children and made use of the sense of guilt in their children toward their sacrifice as a source of authority.

Others have also connected the father's obsessive desire for his son to go to Tsinghua University, popularly known as China's MIT, to a widespread, near-religious addiction to academic achievement as the key to social mobility.

"Watching the film was like reliving my own past," Yang Lufan, a 29-year-old lawyer, told Beijing Review.

Born and raised in Haidian, a district in Beijing where some of China's most elite high schools and universities are clustered, Yang describes herself as a product of jiwa parenting. Stemming from an age-old Chinese superstition that injecting chicken blood can greatly boost a person's energy, jiwa parenting is a trending style in China that is highly invested in ensuring that a child stays above the curve in a highly competitive society.

Just as Jiye was closely monitored by a team of top educators, from a very early age, Yang was enrolled in intensive tutoring classes that commanded all of her free time. Like Jiye, she even moved with her family into a crude aged home close to her school so that she could concentrate on her studies.

"The most troubling part for me, however, was my own reaction to the film," she said, adding that she could not help but feel extremely disappointed when she learned that Jiye did not finish the gaokao, the all-important national college entrance examination that is a make-or-break moment that can completely alter one's course of life.

"And that was the moment when I realized that I, too, have internalized the mentality that values gaokao above all else," Yang said.

Parenting in perspective

In Successor, the gaokao serves both as an end goal for the parents' grand jiwa project and a point of departure where the son plots an escape. In the last act of the film, Jiye, having discovered the truth, decides to renew his passion for running, with full support of his previously controlling parents. The film closes with a post-credit scene in which the couple jokingly discusses having another child while watching their son compete in a running race on live broadcast.

The ending has been met with extremely diverse reactions from the audience.

Some lament that the satire at the heart of the film has not been fully explored. "It could have been a radical breakaway. Instead, we got an ending that in many ways resemble that of a typical skit in Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) galas on TV, where all tensions and conflicts are resolved through a single final remark, baojiaozi ('Let's make dumplings')," Kongshan Daily, a movie blogger, said in a video posted on BiliBili, China's YouTube equivalent.

Others, however, see the ending as an exploration of how parents and children can possibly reconcile their differences across the generational divide.

"The latter half of the film not only keeps the story in balance, but also conveys the idea that, after setting everything up and creating this entire world for their kid, the parents eventually realize their limitations and inevitably have to let go," Abrams said.

"That last scene for me is an open ending, one that symbolizes a yet unwritten chapter in the story of Chinese parenting. After a spoiled first-born, a second son almost crushed under tough love, the couple is still in the process of finding that balance between being strict and supportive, directive and kindhearted," Yang said.

In an interview, Yan Fei and Peng Damo, the directors of the film, said they intentionally structured the narrative in such a way that the audience is more aligned with the father's perspective in the first half and then slips into the son's point of view toward the end.

"We hope that the split in perspectives will allow audiences to both empathize with their parents, to understand their parents just a little bit more, and be able to reflect on the many potential hurts that over-parenting can inflict upon a child," Yan said. 

(Printing edition title: Success and Successor)

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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