Bringing Up Badly
Netflix’s On Children is less a TV series and more an anthology of five feature-length films of childhood misery set in urban, modern Taiwan. Why watch it? The stories—each featuring a surreal element reminiscent of The Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone—are strong and the performances powerful. All five are centred on ferocious parents bent on improving their children’s lives.
‘Mother’s Remote’ concerns a device similar to a TV remote, with which a mother can force her son to keep repeating tutoring classes a day, until he follows her orders. In ‘Child of the Cat’, an adolescent boy cracks under parental pressure and enters a violent alternative dimension triggered by a clutch of little kittens rescued by him. ‘The Last Day of Molly’ involves an overambitious mother who cannot stop herself from plunging into her daughter’s mind using an untested neuro-scientific device—after the girl has committed suicide. In ‘Peacock’, a talented teenage girl belonging to a modest family enters into a Faustian contract with a peacock with mysterious powers. ‘ADHD is Necessary’ takes place in a white-suited world in which children are cloned from ‘superior’ genes. When they can’t keep up with the standards expected of them, their mothers must employ extreme measures to keep from being booted out of their pristine, élite apartments.
All five episodes suffer from the slo-mo affliction of Indian art movies of yore—ordinary gestures such as handing over a key are dragged out for minutes. But an unflinching, gritty realism prevents the series from falling into a trough of sentimentalism. The naked ambition of the parents for their children, the apparent hollowness at the heart of modern Taiwanese society, the lack of anything resembling a cultural or spiritual dimension except in fleeting moments, is striking. This is what makes the series worth watching. The cinematography is pedestrian, the special effects weak. But the sculptural qualities of the actors’ faces are fascinating, reminding me repeatedly of fine carving and painted porcelain. The interior decor of homes, particularly in ‘Peacock’, seemed well-researched. The garish colours of the Fangs’ modest home contrasting cleverly against the cold abstraction of the élite school’s interior, the extreme whiteness of ‘ADHD’s interiors contrasted against mounds of garbage on the city’s outskirts.
—Manjula Padmanabhan