A moving and bracing portrait of a dying woman and her family, Mrs. Fang offers a remarkable variation of Wang Bing’s engaged cinema that demands the viewer to empathize and experience, in real time and real emotion, the intense yet poetically unfolding human dramas captured by his unwavering camera. Wang Bing’s shortest feature to date is among his most ethically and structurally profound—balanced between extended close-ups of the frail Fang Xiuying, locked into an open-eyed coma, and tender scenes of her family alternately overcome by grief and matter-of-factly accepting the inevitable. Most surprising are the sequences featuring two family members leaving Mrs. Fang’s small home to go night fishing, an exercise that gently carries the weight of spiritual metaphor: a search for sustenance, survival, friendship in a cold, dark world.