An Elephant Sitting Still

The events of the film take place over the course of one single day in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang. The beginning of the story features a monologue from Yu Cheng, who says that there is a sitting elephant in a circus in Manzhouli who could be thrashed and beaten but remains still. Yu Cheng is seen with a woman in bed. A man is later found arguing with the woman and it is discovered that Yu Cheng was sleeping with the wife of his close friend. After admitting in a blasé manner, the friend kills himself off-screen. The woman slaps Yu as he blames her for what happened. Eventually he meets the mother of his friend who visits the apartment without revealing to her that he was involved. Moments later he enters a tunnel and meets his girlfriend who he then blames for the suicide; as his girlfriend rejected his advances, which is why he decided to sleep with the wife. He tells her he plans to visit an elephant in Manzhouli that sits still. The girl laughs and eventually asks Yu to join her. Yu wants to be alone and remains under the tunnel.

Simultaneously in the story, Wei Bu is seen to have woken up in his room in another building where his father is complaining about a garbage smell outside the window. He says it is from certain garbage that has not been disposed. His father, sitting on a broken cast, is annoyed and chastises him for leaving his room even filthier. As he leaves his apartment, he watches an old man, named Wang Jin, leave with his pet dog. Wei throws up some paper origami with fire that sticks to the ceiling, which possibly created the smell his father complained about. He leaves for school to meet his best friend Li Kai. They discuss how they will face the school bully Yu Shuai, as Li was accused of stealing his cell phone. Eventually they meet Yu who tells them to meet his gang at the stairway after school. Along the way Wei sees the vice-dean, who tells them the school will eventually close down and he will move to another school. He does as it as to degrade Wei and says that it is the worst school and all the students will eventually become street vendors while he gets to work for a better school. Wei briefly meets his neighbor and friend Huang Ling and invites her to a monkey zoo. Later that day, he and Li face up to Yu Shuai. Yu starts mocking Wei for getting involved, and tells them to kneel and buy him a new phone. Eventually Yu intimidates Wei and finds out they were carrying weapons, including a baton and a gun. Yu pushes Wei and tells him how his father was apparently let go from a company of his family due to accepting briberies. Wei is angered and in defense pushed Yu back who slips through a flight of stairs. Wei runs and seeks his grandmother, who apparently just died. As he returns home and tells his father, he realizes he is not safe at home and runs off to the zoo.

Meanwhile, Huang is seen in her room in the early morning complaining about the leakage in the bathroom. The mother does not care and shows her daughter an irresponsibly battered birthday cake for Huang Ling. Huang is annoyed but eats the cake. Eventually in the afternoon she meets Wei at the zoo who says he plans to leave to Manzhouli to see the elephant. Huang is invited to live with him on the run but mocks Wei for his lack of planning, and quips that the only skill he knows is kicking around a shuttlecock. Eventually Wei tells her to leave and proceeds to go to a bakery. He stands in front of the bakery and discovers the vice-dean is there with Huang. Wei hides his face with a hood behind the bus stop and spies on the two. Yu also happens to be there and notices Huang and the situation he is in and consoles with him, telling him that he is looking for a boy who hurt his brother. Wei does not reveal his identity and eventually leaves. Before he does, he writes a note telling the vice-dean he is screwed. He slams the paper at the window where Huang and the vice-dean are eating cake. Later, Huang and the vice-dean go to a hotel room and Huang discovers in her phone that they were filmed and the video was spread online. The vice-dean then says that he is done for and will never be able to work for the new school. He tells Huang to leave. Later, she arrives to meet her depressed mother and tells her the story. After some bickering, she hides in her room. Eventually the vice-dean and his wife arrive and Huang escapes through the window, coming back with a baseball hat and whacks the vice-dean and his wife for intrusion.

Another neighbor, Wang Jin, is shown to be living with his granddaughter and son and daughter-in-law. His son pleads for him to leave the apartment that Jin owns while he washes his bowl so that he may live in a nursing home, as he and his wife cannot afford to take care of them both. He mulls it over and leaves with his dog, that looks similar to a retriever and a keeshond. Later in the day, while walking he sees a bawling lady looking for her large white dog named Pipi. Eventually he meets Pipi in an alleyway, and Pipi attacks his dog killing Wang's pet and runs away. He later finds out the address of the woman and goes to their apartment. He meets a man and his wife and tells them he saw Pipi and that it killed his dog, which is shown off-screen. The man is upset for the accusations and gets deranged. Later Wang is seen burying his dog under a highway bridge. Wei sees him and asks him for some money. Wei, in return, gives him his pool cue he reclaimed from a store where Yu and his gang stayed. As they are both strolling and discussing, the deranged man drives near them and accuses Wang of possibly killing Pipi, since Pipi is missing and Wang was attacked. Wei tells the deranged man that he is digging his own grave and Wei is then kicked and beaten up. Eventually he drives off convinced no information can be obtained. Wang returns to the apartment building and meets Yu and his gang. They notice the cue and hold him for questioning. Wang escapes and beats up the goons of Yu. Wang reenters his apartment and his son says they should call authorities. However, Wang being a retired soldier eventually decides to go out with his cue and face the men who disappear.

Later at dusk, Wei goes to the hospital and sees Yu again then runs away. He tells Li Kai to meet him at a nearby mall beside the hospital. He then chokes Li Kai out of anger, who reveals that he really did steal the phone of the bully Yu Shuai, since it had a video of Li urinating and of the vice-dean being with Huang in another past event. Wei decides to purchase tickets from a scalper to go to Manzhouli to hide. He discovers the tickets are fake. The scalper leads him to a rooftop where the supposed money to be refunded is kept, they meet his friend and are revealed to be gangsters. They beat up Wei and call up Yu Cheng. Yu arrives and discovers the kid he talked to was also the one responsible for attacking his younger brother Yu Shuai, who he reveals to be dead. Yu Cheng does not care about Yu Shuai and asks Wei where does he plan to run off to. Wei replies to Manzhouli to see the elephant. He is surprised and decides to help Wei by telling his men to purchase tickets. He tells Wei that regardless someone will catch and arrest Wei sooner or later. He then calls the mother of his friend and admits to her that he was there at the apartment the moment his friend jumped, implying he was culpable then subsequently hangs up. All of a sudden Li Kai appears with his gun and tells Wei to run. The men come from behind to attack Li, who accidentally shoots Yu Cheng. Yu Cheng, who is hurt but survives start screaming at Li Kai and Wei Bu while laying on the ground that they should all go to hell. Then he starts laughing with sarcasm. The confused Li Kai claims he is proud of himself and tells Wei he never posted the video of Huang and the vice-dean, which disgusts Wei who leaves him be. The scene then shows Li Kai, who relents sitting on the ground and aims a gun to his chin. The camera moves to Yu's reaction who watches Li kill himself, thereby witnessing two suicides in one day.

By the evening, Wei is seen buying tickets at the station. He meets Wang Jin, who decided to take his granddaughter to see the same elephant show, and Huang Ling, who decides to leave the city. Huang reveals that the tickets were cancelled. They decide to take a bus to Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, which is in the east and connects Hebei to Manzhouli, Inner Mongolia. After a couple bus stops, they exit the bus close to Manzhouli. Long shots show Wei playing with a shuttlecock kicking it around one to three or more times with fellow passengers. The players stand still while the sound of a roaring elephant is heard.

• Peng Yuchang as Wei Bu
• Zhang Yu as Yu Cheng
• Wang Yuwen as Huang Ling
• Liu Congxi as Wang Jin
• Xiang Rongdong as Deputy dean
• Jing Guo as Deputy dean's wife
• Guozhang Zhaoyan as Wei Bu's father
• Li Suyun as Wei Bu's mother
• Kong Wei as Wang Jin's son-in-law
• Li Danyi as Wang Jin's daughter
• Kong Yixin as Wang Jin's granddaughter
• Ling Zhenghui as Li Kai
• Zhang Xiaolong as Yu Shuai
• Wang Ning as Huang Ling's mother

The film is set in the northern Chinese industrial city of Shijiazhuang in the Heibei province.[10] Filming occurred in Shijiazhuang over the course of twenty-five days in March and April 2017.[11]

An emotional Béla Tarr, when presenting the film to an international audience, said that he felt he had done too little to prevent the suicide of his protégé, that the great film will be remembered forever, and that people should look after individuals like Hu.[12] An Elephant Sitting Still was acclaimed by critics. Rotten Tomatoes reports 96% approval based on 46 critics,[13] and the film also holds an 86/100 average on Metacritic.[14] 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."[15]

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." He characterized it as a searching film that avoids "[contriving] an empty solution for the demoralized".[16] Justine Smith, who awarded the film 3.5/4 stars, praised the film's portrayal of love in a system of inequality and oppression. She argued that Hu simultaneously suggests that love in a devastated system "means tethering yourself to people who have long been broken by mistreatment and inequality and who no longer have the capacity to return it", but also that love and beauty are "a constant source of minute, if not fleeting, pleasure." Smith referred to this as a "realistic" portrayal of love in such a system and billed the film's ending as "one of the greatest in contemporary film history", though also referred to the film as "overwhelmingly grey".[17]

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". Brody argued that Hu's "vision conveys a mighty, universal human despair."[18] 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. It’s a film constantly in motion, tracking cat and mouse alike through the city streets. [...] Conflict is borne out of character and circumstance, rather than narrative contrivance or traditional dramatic structure.”[19]

Conversely, Mike D'Angelo of The A.V. Club gave the work a "C+" rating. He stated that "Hu only has a couple of formal moves, which he just repeats over and over", and slammed the film's visuals as "Dardennes-style, minus the sense of bruising intimacy". D'Angelo also wrote, regarding the characters' pessimism, that "it’s hard to become emotionally invested in someone whose impossible dream is to no longer care".[20]

• Official website - United States
• An Elephant Sitting Still at IMDb
• An Elephant Sitting Still at Box Office Mojo