Film Review: Dear You 給阿嬤的情書 (2026) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 10/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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I have always believed that the movies are at their best when they show us ordinary people doing something quietly extraordinary. Not saving the world. Not delivering a speech. Just deciding, day after day, to keep a promise no one will ever thank them for. Dear You is that kind of movie. It is about a woman who spent twenty years writing letters in a dead man’s name so that another woman, far away, would not have to stop hoping. I don’t know that I have seen a better film this year.
The story begins with a grandson, Xiaowei (Zheng Runqi), who is in debt and out of ideas. His grandmother, Ye Shurou (Wu Shaoqing), has lived for decades on the money and the letters that arrived from Thailand. The family story is that her husband, Zheng Musheng, went there during the civil war, made a fortune, and forgot them. Xiaowei goes looking for the money. What he finds is a death certificate from 1960, and a stranger who kept writing after that. The film could have turned into a thriller about fraud. Instead it becomes a story about why someone would do such a thing.
Most of the picture is in Teochew, the dialect of the Chaoshan coast. A great many people in China need subtitles to follow it. That is not a problem. It is the point. These are not “overseas Chinese” in the abstract. They are people from one place, speaking one way, writing home in the old remittance letters called qiaopi. When the film moves back to the 1950s in Bangkok’s Chinatown, you feel you are watching lives that were actually lived, not researched. Lan Hongchun has said most of the plot came from interviews with old migrants. You believe him, because the details have the weight of things that happened to somebody.
Li Sitong plays Xie Nanzhi, the young woman who takes up the pen. She was a finance graduate when Lan found her on a short-video app. She has no movie tricks. She simply seems to be thinking, and then deciding. Wang Yantong gives the missing husband a body and a temper; he is capable of kindness and of violence, which makes the kindness mean more. Wu Shaoqing, as the grandmother who spends her life believing the wrong thing, does the hardest work in the film. She has to be mistaken for decades and still be someone we care about. Usha Seamkhum plays the same woman in old age. She does not speak the language. She doesn’t need to. Her hands do the talking. When the two women finally sit in the same room, one of them can no longer remember the story. It doesn’t matter. The other one can.
There is a moment when a letter that would have explained everything is lost to a typhoon, and only a photograph arrives. The grandmother reads it as proof that her husband started another family. She moves where the post office cannot find her. That is not a screenwriter’s device. That is how families lose one another — not through cruelty, but through a page that never landed. The film does not punish the lie. It is more interested in why a person would keep writing after the man is dead. School fees. New Year money. A name kept alive so a family in Shantou would not have to bury him twice.
People will say the film is sentimental. They will be right, and they will be missing the point. Sentimentality is emotion that exceeds the event. A woman signing another woman’s husband for twenty years, and then not being believed because the weather took one letter, is not a small event.
The feeling here is not in excess of what happened. It is exactly equal to it.
The movie was made with a small budget, with a cast of people who had never acted before and faces from the Chaoshan streets. It has no business moving a multiplex the way it does. It did it anyway. Some films you admire for their skill. This one you remember because it treated a private act of devotion as if it were worth the price of a ticket. I think it is. (Neo, 2026)