‘Left-Handed Girl’ movie review: Shih-Ching Tsou’s restlessly intimate Taipei Story is unruly in all the right ways

Going into Left-Handed Girl with the aftertaste of Anora’s clean sweep still clinging to Sean Baker’s name gave me a brief, involuntary flinch. But thankfully, the dissonance fades quickly. Taiwanese-American filmmaker and long-Baker collaborator, Shih-Ching Tsou’s voice floods her directorial debut with an eye-level empathy that shrugs off Baker’s recent excesses and shields the film from my misgivings. Her command steadies the collaboration so completely that, for the first time since last year, I felt my irritation with Baker (who has co-written and edited the proejct) loosen its grip.

This year’s Taiwanese Oscar submission hinges on the simple cruelty of a grandfather assigning his granddaughter’s left hand, the devil. An architecture of patriarchy, capital, and superstition unfolds from that throwaway idea; all funnelled through a five-year-old who takes adults at their word because she has no other choice.

A still from ‘Left-Handed Girl’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

Left-Handed Girl follows three women returning to Taipei with more debts than options. Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) drags her daughters back to the city to restart her life with a rented noodle stall in a night market. The older girl, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), is a former top student now working in roadside retail to plug the gaps in the family finances. The younger one, I-Jing (Nina Ye), is the “devil-handed” kid, absorbing the city through a childlike mix of awe and misinterpretation. Though the film has the trappings of a textbook, neorealist shuffle through hardship, Tsou stages it as a crowded, funny, bruising family story shot with an almost manic love for Taipei.

The camera keeps crouching to I-Jing’s height, which is where the film feels most alive. Her left hand quickly turns into a narrative engine and moral weather vane. She starts experimenting with the idea that this limb belongs to something wicked, using it for theft and mischief while trying to keep the “good” hand clean. The film is very clear-eyed about how adults weaponise belief without thinking. One offhand remark from a geriatric traditionalist sends this child into a genuine ethical crisis, where she even eyes a cleaver and wonders if cutting off the offending hand might be a reasonable solution.

Tsou and Baker build the film around the internal split of duty versus desire. Shu-Fen shoulders the cost of an ex-husband’s illness and funeral because the culture says a “good” woman pays her debts, even when those debts belong to a man who abandoned her. I-Ann, who once imagined a future at university, is stuck selling betel nut in a glass box to leering men, sleeping with her boss out of compulsion, even if trying to prove to herself that she has some agency left. The left hand becomes a small-scale metaphor for the larger trap of how these women are told they have a choice, then punished whichever way they turn.

Meanwhile, Taipei is restless and gorgeous. Shot on iPhones by Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao, the film leans into an astigmatic, blown-out neon of smeared lights and the endless movement of scooters and market stalls. The film shares DNA with Baker’s Tangerine in the way the digital image is pushed hard, chasing a kind of pop realism. When the camera rides with I-Ann on her scooter or chases I-Jing through the stalls in jumpy, percussion-cut sequences, the film hits a sensory register that also recalls The Florida Project, with kids and young adults moving through a labyrinthine capitalist funhouse with no exits.

Tsou’s political anger sits in who gets space and who doesn’t. The family’s new flat turns out smaller than advertised, and Shu-Fen struggles to make ends meet while her stingy mother’s cherished son is offscreen, absorbing resources and approval. This grandmother runs her own hustles, including a shady, smuggling side business, yet her contempt flows downward, aimed at the divorced daughter who won’t stop needing help. “Losing face” is the governing currency here, and the film keeps returning to how shame and reputation become tools to police women into obedience.

A still from ‘Left-Handed Girl’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

Performance is where the film keeps its footing even when the script starts tugging at too many threads. Tsai plays Shu-Fen with the posture of someone whose spine has been bent by years of compromise. Her flirtations with a kind neighbouring vendor are edged with embarrassment rather than romance-movie glow. Ma’s I-Ann has the brittle charisma of a teenager who knows exactly how smart she is and how little that matters when the tuition money is gone. And Ye, already a tiny professional, carries the whole thing with a face that registers guilt, delight, and a half-understood understanding of class dynamics in a single close-up. There are gorgeous shots of her squeezing through the market that feel like the camera is hanging on for dear life to keep up with her thoughts.

The film does surrender to melodrama in the final stretch. Long-buried resentments, secrets, and pregnancies all converge and detonate at a family banquet in one extended blowout engineered to maximise embarrassment. Though tidy, on an emotional level, it feels like a convenient solution welded onto those previously thrived on messier textures.

Even with that stumble, Left-Handed Girl is a remarkably confident first solo feature. It extends the Tsou/Baker project of documenting people squeezed by money and myth, shifting the centre of gravity toward Taiwanese women who have to carry both. The film is funniest and most piercing when it sticks with I-Jing in the city that keeps feeding her mixed signals. By the time she trots back through the night market, a little more scarred and a little more knowing, Taipei feels changed too. The place hasn’t softened, but it has allowed these women a sliver of ground that is actually theirs, which in this world counts as quite radical.

Left-Handed Girl is currently running on Netflix

Published – November 30, 2025 02:27 pm IST