Pin-wen’s life takes a turn into psychological mystery when she is forced to self-quarantine in the luxurious apartment she shares with her daughter, who displays alternately hostile and creepy behaviour.

It is only after Pin-wen suffers a proper mental breakdown that Xiao Jing realises her mother has been imagining things, including an impending reunion with her ex-husband, Qi-wen (Lee Lee-zen), that is never going to happen.

The girl approaches her estranged father for help, but is thoroughly disgusted by the discovery that Qi-wen’s son with his new wife was born long before he divorced Pin-wen three years earlier.

Keen to protect her mother, but still far too young and inexperienced to handle Pin-wen’s financial troubles on her behalf, Xiao Jing encounters one setback after another. When the mother accidentally sets their apartment on fire and is admitted to hospital and diagnosed as psychotic, the daughter has only the family’s part-time housecleaner (Yang Li-yin) to turn to for emotional support.

The Falls is a mundane yet oddly engaging film that relies on Chia and Wang’s quietly touching performances to sustain the narrative through bursts of unexpected drama – a visit to a grocery that escalates into physical altercations, a real estate transaction that results in one agent slamming another, Pin-wen suddenly becoming the subject of an awkward supermarket manager’s (A Sun’s Chen Yi-wen) affections.

As director and co-screenwriter (with Chang Yao-sheng), Chung arguably uses too heavy a metaphor for the pandemic experience when he gives Pin-wen’s apartment a striking blue tint – courtesy of a construction tarp enclosing the building – for the film’s first half. Then again, his simple, reassuring message to the audience is always there, and in capital letters, on Xiao Jing’s favourite T-shirt: “Don’t sweat it.”