Film Review: Fish Bone 鱼刺 (2025) - China
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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The Silent Sting of Growing Up - It is a rare and quiet agony, the kind “Fish Bone” so masterfully documents. This is not a film of grand gestures or sweeping melodrama, but of humid, cramped rooms and meals eaten in suffocating silence. Chinese Director Zhang Xuyu has crafted a piercingly intimate study of guilt—not the explosive, criminal kind, but the slow-drip, domestic variety that seeps into the soul and crystallizes there, a perpetual, nagging shard.
The film belongs to Li Qi, played by Huang Jingyi in a performance of haunting, nearly wordless restraint. Her face is a landscape of quiet desperation. Having failed her all-important exams and broken a classmate’s phone in a moment of panic, she carries her secret like the film’s titular metaphor lodged deep in her throat. The “fish bone” is the unspoken truth, the shame of disappointing her single mother (a superb, understated turn Wang Yinan), who works tirelessly in a pungent market stall. Every grateful smile from her mother, every morsel of food offered with hopeful expectation, becomes another swallow against the jagged edge of her deception.
Zhang Xuyu and his cinematographer Li Siwei understand the power of place. The camera doesn’t just show the cluttered apartment or the gleaming, scaled chaos of the fish market—it makes you inhabit them. You feel the sticky heat, smell the brine and damp cement, and viscerally understand how these physical spaces become the walls of Li Qi’s psychological prison. The pacing is deliberate, mirroring the stagnant, aimless summer of a life put on hold. This is not boredom; it is the slow, excruciating pressure of a truth begging for release.
Why does it work so well? Because it sidesteps every cliché of the teen angst drama. There is no rebellious outburst set to a pop song, no wisecracking sidekick. The conflict is almost entirely internal, communicated through glances, through the rhythm of chores left undone, through the terrifying chasm of silence across a dinner table. It understands that in certain worlds, the greatest terror isn't a monster, but the fear of extinguishing the hope in a parent’s eyes.
The film’s resolution deserves special praise. It wisely avoids a tidy, redemptive catharsis or a nihilistic crash. Instead, it offers something messier, truer, and ultimately more profound—a moment of painful, honest connection that feels less like a solution and more like a first, raw breath after a long period of holding it in. It’s a conclusion that acknowledges some bones can’t be fully coughed up; we simply learn to live with their presence.
“Fish Bone” is a sharp, uncomfortable, and beautifully observed film. It earns its marks not through spectacle, but through profound empathy and unwavering authenticity. It is a must-watch for anyone who appreciates cinema that dares to sit quietly with its characters in their discomfort, finding a strange, aching poetry in the things we cannot say. (Neo, 2026)