156 min | NR | January 24, 2020 | Netflix
A driving instructor preaches the same slogan to every student while insisting he has only one son. The other one is in prison, and the family has already chosen which boy gets the light and which gets the shade. The sun shines on everyone equally, and that is exactly the problem.
A-Wen teaches people to drive. He repeats the same slogan to every student. Seize the day, decide your path. He has two sons and acknowledges only one of them. The younger boy, A-Ho, goes to prison after a violent attack, and A-Wen tells anyone who asks that he has a single child, the elder A-Hao, a model student bound for medical school. A Sun is about the crushing weight a family loads onto the child it chooses and the silence it hands the child it throws away.
Chen Yi-wen plays A-Wen as a man who has replaced feeling with discipline. He delivers his driving-school slogan like scripture because the alternative is admitting he has no idea how to love his family. Samantha Ko plays his wife Qin as the person absorbing every blow he refuses to feel. Wu Chien-ho gives A-Ho a wounded blankness, a boy who learns the family decided who he was long before he did. Greg Hsu makes the golden son A-Hao quietly unbearable, perfect on the surface and hollow under it. Liu Kuan-ting plays A-Ho’s friend Radish as a grinning debt that keeps coming back to collect.
Chung Mong-hong directs and writes with Chang Yao-sheng, and he shoots the film in the brutal, even light its title promises. The sun here is not warmth. It is exposure, a glare with no shade to hide under, and the camera keeps washing faces flat in it before dropping them into near-total black. The editing is precise and refuses to show off. The film crosses years and cuts between the brothers without announcing the jumps, trusting an image or a single line to carry the leap. One late sequence reframes everything before it with a quiet cut instead of a speech, and the restraint is the point.
A Sun never raises its voice. It builds its tragedy out of ordinary cruelty, the kind a father commits simply by turning his attention elsewhere. The film understands that the favored child and the abandoned child are both casualties of the same lie, that a family can be steered like a car if you only pick the right path. By the end it has earned an image of A-Wen that shatters the discipline he has spent the whole film maintaining. It is a patient, devastating study of the things parents do to their children in the name of love.