‘Girl’ review: Actress Shu Qi’s 1980s-set directorial debut explores childhood trauma

Dir/scr: Shu Qi. Taiwan. 2025. 125 mins.

Petite, pensive and diffident, schoolgirl Lin Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) views the world with fear and trepidation. And for good reason: the older of two daughters of the bitter, damaged Chuan (9m88) and the abusive, alcoholid Chiang (Roy Chiu), Hsiao-lee finds herself bearing the brunt of generational cycles of violence. But a friendship with another girl, Li-Li (Audrey Lin), who shares her name and some of the same unhappy childhood experiences, offers her a release from the relentless misery of her home life. Unflinching in its portrayal of domestic abuse and vivid in its depiction of Keelung, Taiwan in 1988, actress Shu Qi’s directorial debut contains moments of bleak beauty and affecting rawness. But the ambition of the film’s interwoven time lines is not always matched by its execution, particularly in the picture’s somewhat muddled first act.

Shu has an acute eye for detail

A regular collaborator of the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (she starred in Millennium Mambo, Three Times and The Assassin), Shu Qi turned her hand to writing and directing at his suggestion. And Hou’s influence is evident in the picture, which has something of the lush, saturated colour palette – teals, golds and tangerines figure prominently – that made Millennium Mambo such a striking work. The star power of Shu, who most recently appeared in Bi Gan’s Cannes Special Jury Prize-winner Resurrection, will likely be a selling point for the picture, which screens in Toronto and Busan following its Venice main competition bow. It may not, however, be distinctive and assured enough to move far beyond niche arthouse theatrical exposure.

This is a picture that gains confidence and momentum as it unfolds, with the first 20 minutes or so the most disorientating and demanding. Schoolgirls go about their daily business, shot in such tight focus that the concrete urban sprawl around them is reduced to an impressionistic blur of colours. A girl asks permission from her father, a labourer in a field, to study at her friend’s house in the evening – he tells her to forget her studies and help with the cooking. Another girl – Hsiao-lee – zips herself into the PVC cover of her clothes storer, a plastic cocoon that provides scant protection from the drunken, lurching rages of her father.

It takes a while to unpick these two story strands: it’s not perhaps as clear as it could be that the two girls exist in two separate time periods. One is Hsiao-lee, in 1988; the other, it gradually becomes clear, is her mother, Chuan, as a teenager sometime previously. Both girls struggle with their relationships with cruel and overbearing fathers.

There’s a hint in a fleeting scene in the early part of the film that something terrible might have happened to Chuan as a girl, something that derailed her subsequent life and which trickles down into her treatment of her older daughter. And in Hsiao-lee’s paralysed fear of her father, there’s a suggestion that his abuse might go beyond verbal and physical. The exact nature of Hsiao-lee’s miserable home life doesn’t need to be overtly stated to make for uncomfortable and unsettling viewing.

Very gradually, Shu threads together the story elements – Chuan’s early trauma is linked to her deeply unhappy marriage to Chiang, and to her overt cruelty to poor Hsiao-lee. Singer and songwriter 9m88 brings texture to a character who is as much a victim as she is her daughter’s tormentor; Chiu, meanwhile has less to work with in the one-note character of Chiang, who is perpetually either drunk or hungover and is utterly charmless in either state. 

A contrast to the melancholy tone of much of the picture is provided by the character of Lili. A new girl at Hsiao-lee’s school, who has moved back to Taiwan from the US following her parents’ break up, Lili is bouyant despite her troubled family background. She unilaterally pursues a friendship with the glum, silent Hsiao-lee, giving her a first taste of rebellion and dragging her along for misadventures with Keelung’s scooter-riding bad boys 

Where Shu is most successful is in fleshing out the character of the time and the place. She has an acute eye for detail. Every surface in the cramped family apartment is taken up with plastic tat – artificial flowers, toys, decorations – which Chuan assembles to eke out a meagre living. The light in the dour little flat has an almost mildewed, musty quality. In contrast, the world outside, once Hsiao-lee has Li-li as her guide, is thrilling and vividly coloured. The camera captures the energy and bustle of a city that is bursting with life and a promise of better times just out of reach from the prison of Hsiao-lee’s family life.