Film Review: Be Yourself 錯過了，遺憾嗎？ (2026) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½
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There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in after a clean break. Not the dramatic silence of a slammed door, but the smaller one that arrives when someone simply stops answering. In “Be Yourself”, Wu Xiaobei (Zhuang Dafei) is living inside that silence. Fresh out of university, she has been left by her first love, Li Tianhao, without explanation and without the dignity of a proper goodbye. The film does not treat this as tragedy. It treats it as the ordinary violence that young people do to one another when they have not yet learned how much a small decision can cost.
What follows is familiar territory. Xiaobei leans on her best friend Mia (Zhao Jiali), then drifts into the orbits of other men: the practiced older Cui, the eager younger Li, and finally Wang Zhe yuan (Wang Anyu), the one who feels, for a while, like he might understand her. None of these relationships are especially surprising. The film knows the shapes of these encounters and does not pretend otherwise. What it does understand, better than many films of this type, is the texture of not knowing. Xiaobei is not looking for a replacement so much as she is trying to locate the exact moment she stopped being able to imagine a future with the person who left. That search is less about the men than it is about her own refusal to let the past stay finished.
Zhuang Dafei carries most of the film’s weight. She plays Xiaobei as someone who is still performing the version of herself that used to work — the one who could be light, who could recover quickly — while the performance keeps slipping. There are moments when she seems almost irritated with her own sadness, as if she has already heard every reasonable thing a person could say to her and has decided, for now, not to listen. Wang Anyu is more restrained. His character is the one the film wants us to root for, and the actor wisely declines to push for that response. He remains slightly out of reach, which is both the point and the limitation of the role.
The other men are less successful. Lao Cui and the younger Li function mainly as markers along Xiaobei’s path rather than as people with their own gravity. The film is honest enough not to pretend they matter as much as Wang Zhe yuan, but it spends enough time with them that their thinness becomes noticeable. When the story returns to the central question — whether Xiaobei can stop rehearsing the relationship that already ended — the earlier detours feel like time the film did not quite need.
Directorially, the film is unshowy. It trusts longish scenes of conversation and the small shifts in a person’s face more than it trusts plot. That restraint is mostly a strength. The city around the characters is present but not romanticized; it is simply the place where these particular young people are trying to figure out how much of their earlier selves they are still allowed to keep. There is no grand statement about timing or fate. There is only the accumulating evidence that some doors, once closed, stay closed, and that the harder work is deciding what to do with the ones that remain open.
I do not think “Be Yourself” is a great film. It is a careful one. It understands that the most common form of regret is not the spectacular missed chance, but the ordinary one: the message you did not send, the question you did not ask, the assumption that there would be time to be clearer later. It earns its place as a modest, observant piece of work that knows the difference between heartbreak and the p slower business of living with it.
(Neo, 2026)