There have been several claims that the film seems to be inspired heavily from the Iranian movie Bashu, the Little Stranger.
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Being that Bashu speaks Arabic, while Na'i and her children speak Gilaki, they have trouble communicating with each other, although Bashu is able to speak and read Persian (for example in the scene where he picks up the school text book, reading a passage from it in an attempt to appease the children fighting).
The vocabulary of Sichuanese has three main origins: Bashu (or Ancient Sichuanese), Middle Chinese and the languages of the immigrants, including Proto-Mandarin from Hubei, Xiang, Gan and Hakka, which were brought to Sichuan during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Peter Cannon in Publishers Weekly writes that the novel is evocative of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.