The semi-autobiographical film on director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s childhood and adolescence, when he was growing up in Taiwan.

The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.

A lurid fantasy of wounded flesh and accursed lives that entwine and separate in a building run by a landlord (Simon Yam), who seeks to find a particular type of…