I’m glad that this came through. The emotional weight and tension of silence is something that I’ve experienced since childhood. With the way my inner psychology renders familial relationships, noise was good. Whether it was laughter or shouting, noise meant communication and that was always a good thing. But when silence strikes, that to me is when anxieties rise and the danger truly begins to unravel. It’s a transitory state, a period of uncertainty, waiting for whoever decides to speak up, if they would speak up.

In my experience, these moments of silence are when the world really slows down for me, I find my eyes darting, scanning and analyzing every face in the room for a read on their expression. This was a feeling I really wanted to evoke in the cinematography and blocking. In the first dinner scene for example, we gave each character long stagnant takes. And in fact at times, the camera lag behind the character’s actions, often panning or tilting slowly and cautiously, like an observer trying not to offend.

With the gazes between the family – direction, and positioning became a fundamental part in selling this visual motif. Leung holds his eye-line stiffly until he gets his way. Though the camera starts pointing down at him at different intervals across the film, we eventually find ourselves below his eye-line, unable to reach it as he looks onward to his target. With the others, their gazes change sporadically, either in affirmation and understanding of each other, or simply to avoid catching Leung’s line of sight. And it’s not until the end that Hayley learns to lock eyes with her parents, in anger and in sadness.