Set in their apartment in Beijing, Liu and her parents play versions of themselves as they talk, cook, and eat shǔi jiǎo (soup dumplings) at their kitchen table over the course of a night.
As a result of the camera's placement and aspect ratio, the audience only sees the family's hands working at the table unless a character leans down into frame.
... Liu’s films evince a carefully calibrated yet warmly sensual sound and image construction, a droll humanism, and, ultimately, a feisty hopefulness that mark them as extraordinarily valuable in a world that purports to be incapable of taking its time.
"[7] In a 2024 retrospective, Alex Fields of metafilm preferred it to the first film: "Liu is a master of exact compositions that reveal their clever precision and simple beauty over the course of long takes.
A new person enters the frame and alters its fundamental balance, an object stationary for several minutes is moved or comes into use, and the image is rigorously recomposed in real time.
"[8] Film historian David Bordwell called it "a consistently warm, engaging—I don’t hesitate to say entertaining—film that is also a demonstration of how a simple form, patiently pursued, can yield unpredictable rewards.