Song Yili (Peng Yuchang) is a man suffering from serious clinical depression. His mother has died, leaving him a restaurant he is too miserable to run. He is slowly dying from a medical condition for which he refuses to take medication. He has purposefully driven his wife away, and is literally attempting to commit suicide when he is caught in a car accident. While in hospital he shares a room with precocious nine-year-girl Xiaoju (Enyou Yang), who somehow convinces him to join her on a secret road trip to find her father.

Chinese cinema has a much looser sense of genre than its Western equivalent, and that relaxed shift from comedy to drama and back again is evident in Always Have, Always Will. What begins as a miserable profile of suicidal depression is enlivened considerably by the arrival of the loud and excitable Xiaoju, and the film shifts rapidly into a familiar adult-and-child road movie. The characters’ actions, however, prove to have consequences, and in the last half hour in particular the film takes a particular serious, albeit melodramatic, turn.

Liu Jie is a socially conscious filmmaker. His 2018 feature Baby, which boldly challenged China’s treatment of children with disability, took nine years to progress from screenplay to finished film. This new film is much less confrontational but is still willing to embrace difficult topics and themes, either through its open discussion of terminal illness or its representations of adult disability. There is a far loftier purpose to Always Have, Always Will, which is to ask its audience the point of living at all if people are simply going to die at the end. Its answers are well considered and presented.

Peng Yuchang does an excellent job with a difficult character. He is miserable, relatively cranky, and occasionally unpleasant – all difficult traits with which to make an enjoyable protagonist. Through moments of levity, warmth, and honesty he successfully forms a genuinely sympathetic character for whom audiences will root. Enyou Yang, as a juvenile performer, is more limited in depth but does manage to hit all of the required dramatic and comedic beats asked of her – particularly the latter.

The central road trip of the film is an episodic affair, bringing a range of supporting actors to come in for 10-15 minutes, make an impact with their audience, and then exit. It is generally well-paced and plotted. To be fair the film’s final scenes do test one’s patience. A series of scenes each feel like the film’s final conclusion, only to be followed by another similar scene, and then another, and another. The actual final moments even come after the closing credits, which pretty much guarantees that whatever effects Liu intended are badly blunted.

On a technical level the film is reasonably strong. Liu makes use of a largely English-language soundtrack of pop and soft rock, which generally match the sentiments of their respective scenes. The film captures the Chinese countryside well, with a lot of striking green forestry in view.

This is a warm, engaging melodrama full of heart and rich in character and story detail. It is also the exact sort of Chinese feature that will run under the radar with an international audience: it is not packed with martial arts or gunfights, it is not a prestige festival picture, and it is not a cartoon about Chinese mythology, Instead it is a sweet, modestly formed film. It is currently screening in select cinemas both in Australia and overseas. Don’t sleep on it.