Best Actress
In a destitute single-parent household, a mother never imagined the dinner celebrating her only son’s imminent career launch would become their final shared moment. When he calmly declares his plan to relocate to Shanghai with his boyfriend, her reality fractures. Since the divorce, son and mentally fragile mother have suffocated in codependency—years of smothering control now crystallizing into his despair-fueled suicide. Adrift between delusion and truth, the mother compulsively replays imagined scenes: tender reconciliations, meaningful dialogues, sunlit futures. These spectral visions become her desperate tools for self-absolution, yet reality remains unyielding. Confronting her fractured reflection, she confronts legions of families mirrored in this tragedy, confronts an era where toxic kinship poisons all. Who isn’t collateral damage in such cycles? Through her limbo between illusion and actuality, the film excavates a philosophical paradox: the irreconcilable clash between causality (her control as catalyst) and consequentialism (his death as moral verdict)—each perspective condemning, neither redeeming.