‘Girl On Edge’ review: Friendship turns to rivalry in Chinese figure skating drama

Dir/scr: Zhou Jinghao. China. 2025. 108mins

Chinese figure skater Jiang Ning (Zhang Zifeng) faces a make-or-break competition under the harsh and unforgiving eye of her mother and trainer Wang Shuang (Ma Yili). A friendship with a girl who works at the rink, Zhong (Ding Xiangyuan), offers Jiang an escape from the rigours of her training. But Zhong’s natural gift for skating catches the attention of the ruthless Wang, and the two girls are pitted against each other in this stylish, but overwrought and over-complicated psychological thriller from first time director Zhou Jinghao.

Stylish, but overwrought and over-complicated 

The director, who worked in Silicon Valley before pivoting to filmmaking with the short film Isolated Island (2021), clearly has a strong instinct for visual storytelling, but the writing is less confident. The film will draw inevitable comparisons to both Black Swan and I, Tonya, but lacks the razor-cut of dread of the former and the propulsive energy of the latter. While Girl On Edge starts promisingly, it soon starts to repeat itself before finally explaining itself, losing much of the tension along the way. The launchpad of a premiere in Cannes Directors Fortnight, plus committed, dialed-up-to-eleven performances from all three leads, should nevertheless ensure that the picture has a life at further film festivals with a focus on Asian cinema. 

Zhou’s eye-catching visual sense is evident from the outset, with a striking sequence in which a girl with dyed scarlet hair floats across the ice, only to be felled by her rival. The red of her hair mingles with the pooling crimson of her blood on the ice, before the story rewinds to a period three weeks previously. 

Jiang, a tiny, child-sized creature with a huge ambition, is training with a group of similarly driven young skaters. The coach’s attention is preoccupied with another skater who is tipped to be a future national champion. Meanwhile Jiang botches her landing on each extravagant leap and spin, wiping out time and again. Frustrated, she breaks the cardinal rule, calling out to the trainer to request a one on one session “Coach Wang…Mum!”. Wang fixes her with a scalding look of disdain and eviscerates her with words. “Is there really any point?”.  

It’s a complicated relationship: the mother, a former skater herself, blames her pregnancy, and by extension her daughter, for the end of her own career. Now she pushes Jiang to succeed, but also undermines her at every opportunity. It’s no wonder that Jiang is at breaking point. 

Zhong, meanwhile, skates for the joy of it and lures Jiang out of her training bubble to a roller disco held in the basement of a disused shopping mall, a place full of popping neon colours and a stark contrast to the bleak, wintry palette of Jiang’s life at the rink. But it’s a testy friendship which descends into paranoia and recrimination once Jiang starts to suspect that Zhong is out to steal her career, her glory – and her coach. For Jiang, everyone is a potential rival but only Zhong is a real threat. 

The skating sequences are impressive and inventively shot, with Jiang’s self-doubt captured by a jittery go-pro-style lens focused close in on her panicked face and fumbling feet. Elsewhere, distorting lenses evoke a sense that reality is slipping and Jiang’s fragile psyche is besieged. The final twist is not entirely unexpected. And unfortunately, it isn’t tightly plotted enough to avoid unraveling under scrutiny.