Set in the fictional Chinese city of Slinkytown, Successor stars the filmmakers’ regular leading man Shen Teng as Ma Chenggang, a hardworking yet impoverished family man that the country’s prosperity has seemingly passed by.
He lives in a dilapidated courtyard house in the centre of the city, with his wife (Ma Li), young son Jiye (Xiao Bochen), and mother-in-law. Chenggang rides a donkey and cart to work, while the women slave away at home and the studious Jiye runs back and forth from the local school.
Almost immediately, however, it is revealed that this is all a ruse. Chenggang is actually a hugely successful business magnate overseeing a vast empire, and everyone in the community is seemingly in his employ.
His modest home is fitted with hidden doors and passages that lead to an underground command centre, from where Chenggang and his staff pursue their sole mission: to ensure Jiye experiences a simple upbringing uncorrupted by wealth and privilege.
Only when he comes of age, and has proved to his father that he has become an honourable young man, will he learn about his vast inheritance.
In order for Chenggang to pull off this baffling, patently absurd, Truman Show-esque folly, every facet of Jiye’s life must be carefully orchestrated.
Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers, even the local media toe the line in order to uphold Chenggang’s charade, going so far as to lie to Jiye about his health, persistently challenge him with complex mathematical equations, even pose as English-speaking tourists in order to nurture his development.
Played largely for broad laughs that rarely tickle the funny bone, it is difficult to see Successor as anything other than a thinly veiled critique of states where information, education, healthcare and so on are heavily regulated by a single central authority.
Not only that but the filmmakers clearly portray Chenggang as misguided and his actions ultimately detrimental to Jiye’s development, which makes the film’s wide release and rapturous reception nothing short of baffling.