So the premise of the movie is that a Chinese grandma is dying of cancer, but her family isn’t going to tell her about it so she doesn’t despair, but they are going to have one of her grandchildren move up their wedding date to give the family a reason to come back to China and visit the grandma.

The character we’re mostly following through this is played by Awkwafina, the dying woman’s Chinese-born but American-raised granddaughter. She’s doing acting that’s more lowkey than you’d expect if you’d seen some of her other roles, in a way that totally works with her character — when she’s on her own in NYC, she’s a brash, confident, outgoing New Yorker; but once she’s put in a setting with her family, in the China she barely remembers from when she was a little kid, she sort of falls into that family pattern of being that little kid again.

The family dynamics are one of the hearts of the movie, with the grandma’s two sons both having left China — one to Japan (the one whose kid is getting married, to a Japanese woman who doesn’t understand Chinese, to the grandma’s disgust), and the other to America — and now back together for the first time in a quarter century. There are generational and international differences that get teased out, and thoughts about what people want for their kids and from their kids. As a quiet family movie, it’s great.

But of course the other heart of the movie is the lie at its core, and the various characters’ opinions about whether or not it’s a good idea, and the false emotional notes that come of trying to keep the secret. This could easily have been played out as a kind of simple morality tale or culture clash thing, and at one point, the Japanese uncle gives a little speech about the difference between the East and the West that way. But it’s largely treated in this ambiguous way, where nobody seems really thrilled about it, but neither is anyone cocksure confident that it’s the wrong thing to do.

Reading reviews of it, one critique was that some of the characters are thin, which is true. You don’t ever find out what Awkwafina’s cousin, who’s getting married, thinks of the whole situation, or indeed what he really thinks about getting married at this moment. But there’s already a lot going on here, and I don’t think it’s any great sin to keep the movie focused on the relationships that it really wants to explore, instead of going off on tangents with minor characters.

The movie is by turns wryly funny and quietly heartbreaking, but always in a reserved and understated way that keeps it from turning into the melodrama that it could easily have been. Recommended.