The Difficulty of Homecoming: Film and Philosophy through Monster, A Hidden Life, and Mountains May Depart

This thesis develops a film-philosophical account of the difficulty of homecoming. It offers close readings of three films—Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023), A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019), and Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke, 2015)—and examines how they explore the question of becoming at home in the world. It does so in dialogue both with these directors’ oeuvres and with resonant films, as well as with thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Rowan Williams, and Gillian Rose. I begin by introducing the question of homecoming through Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), characterising it as an inquiry into tragedy. I contend that the tragic dimension of homecoming, along with its metaphysical and theological resonance, remains underexplored in the studies on cinema and home. Addressing this gap, I argue that Monster, A Hidden Life, and Mountains May Depart reveal the tragic dimension of homecoming as a non-negotiable and unfinishable movement between the homely and unhomely in language, transcendence, and time. Chapter One interprets Monster as a mind-game film, discussing how its mind-game, qua language game, explores homecoming in language. Moving between different perspectives, the film invites us to navigate extreme situations of language: unintelligibility and falsehood. It thus discovers a grammar of homecoming amid the difficulties of speaking, especially in relation to love, truth, death, and grace. Chapter Two examines A Hidden Life as an example of postsecular cinema. Focusing on its largely overlooked aesthetics of inversion, equivocation, and irony, I show how its protagonists, particularly Franz Jägerstätter, conceive, misconceive, and reconceive home as they negotiate the overlaps and disjunctions between immanence and transcendence. Chapter Three shows how Mountains May Depart situates home in the ceaseless and irresistible departure of time. Animating various forms of recollection and repetition, the film envisages home in terms of eternity—not as an elsewhere beyond time but as a persistent return through its wreckage. The film thus demonstrates a form of faithfulness, which exemplifies world cinema, especially its commitment to reality. I conclude by defining homecoming in cinema as a difficult movement between risk and grace.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Wu, Haotian

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• McMahon, Laura
• McNeill, Isabelle
• Pickstock, Catherine

• Gillian Rose
• Hirokazu Kore-eda
• Jia Zhangke
• postsecular
• Rowan Williams
• Terrence Malick
• the uncanny
• tragedy

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/dd7c8bdb-f2ca-4ad3-9779-4f5d1f6327f8/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.132269

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/406139