Dying to Survive (2018) Review: Laughter With a Conscience

Is Dying to Survive worth watching?

Yes. Dying to Survive is one of the best Chinese mainstream films of the past decade, a comedy about medicine smuggling that turns, without ever losing its footing, into a genuinely moving drama about who gets to stay alive. Xu Zheng’s lead performance holds together slapstick and moral outrage, and the supporting cast gives the patients faces rather than statistics. The only real caveat is that the second half leans hard on sentiment, but by then the film has earned it.

What is Dying to Survive about?

In Shanghai, Cheng Yong (Xu Zheng) is a failing shopkeeper selling dubious health tonics, behind on rent and struggling to keep a place in his young son’s life. A leukaemia patient (Wang Chuanjun) approaches him with a proposition: the life-saving drug he needs is ruinously expensive, but a legal generic version made in India costs a fraction of the price. Cheng agrees to smuggle it in purely for the money, and soon finds himself supplying a growing circle of desperate patients, including a single mother (Tan Zhuo) and a sullen young man (Zhang Yu).

Dying to Survive is the feature debut of director Wen Muye and was inspired by a real case of a leukaemia patient who imported generic medicine from India. It is in Mandarin, runs 117 minutes, and screened in the Chinese Film Panorama section at the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2018.

A comedy that sharpens into anger

The first act plays like a hustler comedy. Cheng is small-minded, broke and quick-tongued, and the early scenes of amateur smuggling and awkward sales pitches are genuinely funny. Wen keeps the pace brisk and the jokes rooted in character rather than gags, which matters, because the laughter is setting a trap.

As Cheng’s customers become people he knows, the film’s tone shifts. The prices of patented medicine, the sheer arithmetic of illness, and the choice between breaking the law and watching someone die move from the background to the centre. The anger is directed less at individual villains than at a system, and the film makes that argument through situations rather than speeches. It is no surprise the film prompted a national conversation about drug pricing on its release in China.

Xu Zheng’s selfish hero

Xu Zheng, best known for broad comedy, gives a performance of real range here and won the Golden Rooster for Best Actor for it. He never softens Cheng too early: the character’s decency arrives reluctantly and is often inconvenient to him, which makes his gradual change believable rather than sentimental. His comic timing keeps the early scenes light, and his stillness in the later ones carries enormous weight.

The ensemble is just as important. Wang Chuanjun plays the first patient with a quiet dignity, and Tan Zhuo and Zhang Yu bring distinct kinds of stubbornness to people who have learned not to expect help. Together they form a makeshift family, and the film’s most affecting moments come from their ordinary kindness to one another.

Where the sentiment runs high

Dying to Survive does not do subtlety in its final stretch. The music swells, the emotional beats are signposted, and viewers resistant to crowd-pleasing melodrama may feel manipulated at points. The film also treats its more complicated questions about law and enforcement somewhat neatly. These are small limitations in a film whose emotional honesty is otherwise hard to fault, and the Golden Rooster awards for Wen as best new director and for the original screenplay reflect how carefully the balance is handled.

Who should watch Dying to Survive?

It is an easy recommendation for anyone who likes social-issue drama with humour and heart, and a good entry point for viewers new to contemporary Chinese cinema. At just under two hours it moves quickly. The film deals frankly with serious illness, poverty and loss, and it is emotionally heavy in its later stages, though it contains little violence; older teenagers and adults will get the most from it.

If it moves you, try these next:

• Better Days, another Chinese mainstream hit that uses genre storytelling to confront a real social problem.
• The Farewell, Lulu Wang’s gentler comedy-drama about illness, family and the things people cannot say to each other.

The verdict

Dying to Survive is that rare film that makes an audience laugh, cry and get angry in the right proportions. Xu Zheng’s reluctant hero and a superb supporting cast turn a story about drug prices into a deeply human drama, and its occasional sentimentality barely dents its power.

Rating: 4.5/5