[4][5][6] The film has won acclaim from established directors such as Béla Tarr, Wang Bing, Ang Lee, and Gus Van Sant.

In Shijiazhuang, gang member Yu Cheng tells a woman in bed with him of a sitting elephant in a circus in Manzhouli.

The woman's husband, one of his friends, comes home to discover Yu Cheng, and commits suicide by jumping out the window.

A student named Wei Bu wakes up to his abusive father yelling about his filthy room.

Wang tracks down the couple who own the dog, only for the man to aggressively deny the attack and refuse to pay for any bills.

Wang returns to his apartment building, encountering Yu Cheng and his gang who recognize the cue and corner him.

Inside the bakery, the dean tells Huang of a boy he knew who beat a cat to death with stones.

Li admits he did steal Yu Shuai’s phone, as it contained a video of him urinating and one of the dean with Huang.

Wei meets Wang at the train station, who decides to take his granddaughter to see the elephant, and Huang, who also wants to leave.

[10] This was a result of low budget: Hu originally intended to film statically and with wide angles, but it was too expensive.

Reportedly, Hu struggled at this time with maintaining creative control over the project, as well as making enough money from it to be able to live.

He described the experience as "humiliation, despair and powerlessness" online, and was berated by Wang who also posted that the film was a "mess."

Wang Xiaoshuai's name was scrubbed from the press kit credits, but his production company remained attached.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 94%, with an average rating of 8.40/10, based on 52 critics, the critic consensus says "A remarkable debut that sadly serves as its creator's epitaph, An Elephant Sitting Still offers an uncompromisingly grim yet poignant portrait of life in modern China.

[19] Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote that although the film has "a soap opera season's worth of romantic indiscretions, sudden deaths, unfortunate accidents, provoked and unprovoked attacks", the story "somehow never loses its sense of balance and modulation."

Chang argued that the work had a consoling insight that the characters are all worth knowing despite their flaws, and lauded it as "a triumph of bold sociopolitical critique and intimate human portraiture, and a reminder that you rarely encounter the one without the other.

"[20] David Ehrlich, who assigned the film an "A−" rating in IndieWire, argued that An Elephant Sitting Still "has little interest in the conventional drama of cause and effect, and its fractured structure is used to emphasize the distance between these people rather than the ties that bind them together."

[22] In The New Yorker, Richard Brody lauded An Elephant Sitting Still as one of the greatest recent films, writing that Hu "builds an intricate grid of conflict-riddled connections among the movie's main characters" and that the "volatile, roving long takes pursue the characters to the deepest corners of their explosive despair".

"[23] Matthew Thrift of Little White Lies praised the film as "without question one of the strongest debuts in recent memory", arguing that "the remarkable surety of Hu's direction provides a restless momentum.