Film Review: After Typhoon 下一个台风 (2025) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a specific kind of quiet that exists after a disaster. Not the quiet of peace, but the quiet of shock. Li Yu’s After Typhoon understands this. It understands that the worst storms aren’t the ones that knock down your house, but the ones that take up residence inside you. This is not a film about weather. It is a film about the weather of the soul.
Li Yu has always made movies about women living in their bodies, about the physical weight of desire and pain. Here, she strands two of them on a windswept island that feels like the edge of the world. The frame is filled with salt-rusted railings, damp laundry, and skies the color of a bruise. You can feel the humidity. You can feel the isolation. It is a place where you go to disappear.
And yet, in this place of disappearance, two people find each other. The film belongs to its two leads. Zhang Zifeng plays Lin Momo, a young woman who has arrived on this island carrying an invisible piano on her back—the weight of some unnamed trauma she is trying to outrun. Zifeng’s face is a miracle of modern cinema. She can convey the entirety of a tragic novel with the slightest downturn of her eyes. She is fragile, yes, but she has thorns. You believe she is hiding, and you believe she could scratch you if you got too close.
Opposite her is Zhang Weili, the UFC fighter, in a role that feels like it was written in the language her body already speaks. She plays Axi, a local oyster farmer. She has very few lines, but she doesn’t need them. Weili moves like someone who knows the exact weight of things—of a bucket of oysters, of a punch, of silence. Her strength is not the strength of a movie star flexing; it is the grounded, gravitational pull of a woman who works for a living. When she is next to Zifeng, she acts as a human anchor. Their connection doesn’t feel scripted. It feels like two frequencies finally finding the right channel.
The cinematography treats the island as a character in decay. This is not a postcard. The beauty here is harsh and functional. The titular typhoon is not just a plot point; it is the inevitable arrival of truth. We spend the whole movie waiting for the wind to pick up, waiting for the past to crash onto the shore. The film knows that you cannot hide from the weather forever.
If I have a reservation, it is that the film sometimes gets lost in its own atmosphere. The middle act drifts a little, spending too much time with the island’s side characters. I appreciate the texture they add, and seeing Angelica Lee is always a welcome sight, but it pulls focus from the two women we came to watch. It’s a small price to pay for the finale, however.
The ending of After Typhoon is what elevates it from a good drama to a memorable one. It refuses to give us sunshine. It refuses to tell us that the trauma is gone, that the past is settled. Instead, it offers something more profound: the image of two people standing together as the next storm approaches. We can’t stop the wind. We can only choose who holds our hand while it blows.
This is a slow, moody, deeply felt piece of work. It asks for your patience, and it rewards it with a quiet kind of grace. Li Yu hasn’t just made a movie about surviving a typhoon. She has made a movie about learning to breathe in the stillness at its center. (Neo, 2026)