‘Left-Handed Girl’ review: Sean Baker-backed family drama is set on the bustling streets of Taipei

Dir: Shih-ching Tsou. Taiwan/France/USA/UK. 2025. 109mins

Returning to her native Taiwan from her US home, regular Sean Baker collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou channels the colour and chaos of Taipei’s famous night markets into a tri-generational female story with a restless, messy appeal. It’s here that stressed mum Sho-fen (Janel Tsai) tries to make a go of a noodle stall, leaving her super-cute five-year-old girl I-Jing (Nina Ye), in the not very reliable care of her oldest daughter, I-Ann (Shih-yuan Ma).

Tsou brings some distinctly Taiwanese themes to the fore

Street-shot, cluttered and claustrophobic, Left-Handed Girl is both fast and slow, moving along at a relentless pace yet taking time to advance a storyline that turns out to be about the precariousness of women’s independence and the perpetuation of male privilege – sometimes by the very women that suffer under it. Despite its whatever-works handheld aesthetic, this is a film that will travel widely – not just because of the Baker stamp of approval. There’s engagement in its energy, its sense of humour, its simmering feminist anger and the standout performances of three fine leads.

You could read the story – co-written with Baker, who also produces and edits – as a kind of mash-up of Take Out and The Florida Project. Tsou and Baker co-directed the first, a 2004 micro-budget film about an undocumented immigrant who works as a restaurant deliveryman in New York, while The Florida Project was one of four Baker-directed films that Tsou produced between 2012 and 2021. But Tsou also brings some distinctly Taiwanese themes to the fore. Among them are the favouring of sons over daughters in a society that is still in many ways deeply Confucian, and the trend of young people changing their names to change their luck.

Sho-fen and her two daughters have just moved into a cramped new apartment in the big city. Mum rents a food stall in a local night market, hoping she can make the payments, while I-Ann – a smart student who couldn’t afford to go to university – works as a ‘betel nut beauty’, dressing in skimpy clothing to attract male clients to a roadside store where she is engaged in a desultory affair with the loutish boss. I-Jing is starting at a new primary school, but she also becomes an after-school fixture at the market where kindly stall owners like Johnny (Brando Huang) keep an eye on her while she wanders.

Johnny’s shy crush on Sho-fen and gentle attempts to help her out of her debt spiral makes him the film’s only positive male role model. Sho-fen feels obliged to pay for the funeral of the husband who abused her years before, while her own mother, who has gotten herself involved in a fake US passport scam, has secretly left her Taipei apartment to her already well-off eldest son, cutting Sho-fen and her two sisters out of the inheritance. As if that’s not bad enough, grandpa, a grizzly old traditionalist, tells little I-Jing that she should stop using her left-hand to eat or draw with – because it’s the ‘devil’s hand’.

That trope provides a tough, raw film with its main comic engine, as I-Jing decides that anything her left hand does is not her responsibility. Left-Handed Girl channels most of its drama through the whiplash-tense figure of I-Ann and most of its comedy through her oh-so-cute little sister, leaving mum as the exhausted wreck in the middle caught between her daughters’ needs, her sisters’ carping and her mother’s refusals to help. When a meerkat suddenly appears in the apartment, it’s a curveball.

But the real curveball comes at the end, in a long, standalone, real-time scene of startling dramatic power set at the family matriarch’s birthday celebration. This is a set piece worthy of Mike Leigh or Dardenne brothers, and it is credit to Tsou’s direction and Baker’s editing that, for all the sense that it’s been stapled on to the end of the story, it still works.