Muzi, 22, comes home to Hangzhou for Chinese New Year, where she plays her roles as a daughter, a half-sister, and a girlfriend. Roaming in this city that feels so familiar yet distant, Muzi searches for a place where she belongs.

Xinyuan Zheng Lu’s hypnotic, monochrome debut distills that all-too-familiar state of post-graduation inertia into an aching portraiture of a millennial woman, cloaked in mists of cigarette smoke and wistful memories. The urban ennui of Hangzhou, Lu’s hometown, is at once mesmerizing and intimate.