"At first glance, one might describe 'Suburban Birds' as telling two parallel stories. But whether those strands are truly parallel - as opposed to successive, perpendicular, diagonally intersecting, or merely floating arbitrarily around each other in a soft fever dream - is the first of many question marks in Chinese writer-director Qiu Sheng's perplexing but oddly alluring debut feature. Taking inspiration from Kafka as well as the relaxed temporal puzzling of Hong Sang-soo's most playful work, the film's focus drifts elegantly between an engineer uncovering more than just structural rubble while assessing a ruined residential site for redevelopment, and an end-of-innocence portrait of children roaming the same suburban terrain: perhaps in its past, its future or, somehow, both." (Variety)
