This confinement, added to the aridity of the sparse dialogue and the absence of action, could bother many, especially as the scenes of wandering in his previous films were often successful, but fortunately once again Tsai succeeds in his bet to say something universal using almost nothing. So the two apartments. Between the two, a hole in the ceiling. He seems to play idly. But more than slowness, it would be necessary to speak of arrhythmia.
Slowness is deliberate.
One can decide to act slowly while his performance appeared to be the result of a perpetual fight against himself. The film tries to show how the hole will bring the two characters closer together. Traditional communication seems not to exist any more and is an anomaly, a crack in the daily routine that proves necessary to restore certain social links. The hole is like the relations between the characters. The hole was dug by a plumber, who tried to locate the source of the flood in the woman's apartment.